ArtCurious News This Week: November 11, 2022
Happy Friday, listeners! It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, back at you this week with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. Today is Friday, November 11, 2022.
This week’s stories:
New York Times: Paul G. Allen’s Art at Christie’s Tops $1.5 Billion, Cracking Records
New York Times: Lee Bontecou, Acclaimed Creator of Unusual Sculptures, Dies at 91
The Egyptian General Authority for Tourism Activation: The discovery of a rocky tunnel in the area of the Temple of Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria
ARTnews: Thousands of Looted Benin Bronzes Scattered in Museums Worldwide Are Now Listed in an Online Database
ARTnews: Two Climate Protesters Scribble Ink on Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Prints at National Gallery of Australia
Please support ArtCurious. Donate here via VAE Raleigh
Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts and FOLLOW on Spotify
Episode Transcript
Hi there, everyone. It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, in your ears today with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history.
Today is Friday, November 11, 2022. And let me start today not with news, but a huge, huge thank you. You stepped up for me and for ArtCurious last week when I got vulnerable with you and asked for your support. Thanks to the dozens of you who joined Patreon and for those who donated outright. I’m beyond humbled and so grateful. Thank you. If you haven’t joined Patreon yet, remember that for as little as $4 a month you can get an ad-free feed of this very show! More details are at patreon.com/artcurious. You can find the link in our show notes for today’s ep in your podcast app, or on our website, Artcuriouspodcast.com. Now, onto the news!
This was another big news week in the art world. Let’s begin with Wednesday night’s record-smashing art sale of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s art collection. Given its own special sale with a sale title nonetheless, Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection has been split into two sales to feature over 150 works of art. Wednesday night’s sale was the first of these sales, featuring 60 pieces. And y’all, this was always going to be huge. But just how huge it ended up being may have been a surprise. The entire collection, featuring works of art by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney, Agnes Martin, Gustave Klimt, Georges Seurat, and so many more, was estimated to be worth over one billion dollars. The first sale netted more than that for half of the collection, topping out at 1.5 billion dollars, making this single event the largest auction return ever, with multiple works breaking the significant $100 million mark. At least one of these paintings, a completely exquisite painting titled Birch Forest by Gustave Klimt (one of my personal favorites of that particular artist, and one I’ve profiled several times on my Instagram account in the past), broke records on its own for the most expensive auction result for that particular artist. But for me, here’s the best part: per the late collector’s wishes, all proceeds from this sale—both part one and part two—will be going to philanthropic causes. According to the New York Times, the estate has not made public the list of beneficiaries for this sale, as they didn’t want to discourage buyers who might not necessarily agree with those particular charitable causes. But history has been made: and perhaps an entire new season of ArtCurious—Art Auction Audacity, Part 2?—could be built around this landmark event.
Next up, it’s another big news item—but not as positive of one. This week, the art world lost Lee Bontecou, the acclaimed artist whose death at age 91 was reported this week by the New York Times. Bontecou’s works are typically these wall or ceiling-mounted sculptures that are sometimes jarring, often disturbing, and totally original, and she got both big attention and gallery representation in the mid-1960s, a very macho time in the art world, and she became one of the first female artists to enter this hierarchical subset of society when she was picked up by the famed Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Using everything from industrial parts salvaged from old machinery to dense, delicious velveteen, Bontecou’s works just grip you, bring you closer, and sometimes repel you at the same time. And she was heralded by the art world as something special from the beginning. The artist Donald Judd called her, quote, “one of the best artists working anywhere,” and defined her pieces as living in an in-between state, a middle realm that was, quote, “a three-dimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture.” A commission for a 21-foot-long wall sculpture for Lincoln Center planted her even more firmly the art star map.
Though Lee Bontecou received this attention early on in her career, she was also exhausted by the New York art scene, instigating a move with her young family outside of the city into Pennsylvania, and she commuted into the city for the better part of 20 years to teach at Brooklyn College during the latter half of her life. When, beginning in the 1990s, her work began to receive an uptick in attention again, she often ignored requests for loans or exhibitions, including from the famed Whitney Biennial. And there’s bravery in that. Critics sometimes bemoaned her distance, her self-imposed exile from New York at the time that it was the acknowledged center of the art world. But in the words of Bontecou herself, quote, “I’ve never left the art world. I’m in the real art world.” Lee Bontecou was an original, an inspiration, and she will be missed.
More stories are coming at you for ArtCurious News This Week. So please support me and the show by listening to a couple of ads, and we’ll be right back. Thanks for listening!
Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our last story today, we’re heading to the Middle East for something completely different. This week, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that archaeologists had uncovered what they are referring to as “a secret tunnel” underneath a structure called Taposiris Magna, a temple dedicated to Osiris, the famous god of the dead of Ancient Egyptian mythology. Kathleen Martins, an archaeologist with the Dominican-Egyptian archaeological mission of the University of San Domingo in WHEARE, has been excavating Taporsis Magna for the past twenty years, and in 2021 her team uncovered 16 burial chambers with two mummies therein, with hopes that additional digs would uncover the remains of none other than Cleopatra and Marc Antony themselves. While not nearly as flashy as that discovery would be, this tunnel is being described by Martins as a, quote, “Engineering miracle,” stretching for around 4,300 feet in length and over 6 feet in height. It remained undiscovered for thousands of years because it had been previously submerged in water after the temple collapsed following a series of earthquakes between 320 CE and 1303 CE. And Martins is hopeful that this tunnel bodes well for future findings. So far, the team has also uncovered coins featuring the images of both Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, as well as ceramics, statues of various Egyptian deities, and alabaster busts. I’m sure we will hear about this archaeological project in the months and years to come.
Before we go: two updates in brief to some news stories I previously covered on ArtCurious News This Week. First, ArtNews reported this week that the first comprehensive online database of the world’s looted works from the Kingdom of Benin is now up and running. Called Digital Benin, this tool has catalogued and identified more than 5,000 works of art taken from the African kingdom by British colonists in the late 19th century, documenting their current locations, provenance histories, and—this is my favorite part—oral histories, quote, “narrated by Benin artists and elders that expand on the significance of the artworks to local art and culture.” Unquote. I LOVE THIS. This database was put together by an international team led by Barbara Plankensteiner, the director of the Museum am Rothenbaum Kulturen und Kunste der Welt in Hamburg. Dig in, folks—what an incredible resource this is, and one that, I imagine, and hope will have a great influence on the ongoing restitution battles for these precious cultural treasures.
And last up: and I’ll only give a tiny amount of airtime to this one, but climate protesters are at it again, this time scrawling ink all over some screen prints—framed and under glass, of course—by Andy Warhol that were on view at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The goal, according to the responsible group, Stop Fossil Fuels Subsidies, is working to raise awareness of Australia’s dependence and support of use of fossil fuels.
Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to ArtCurious News this Week. As always, if you liked this episode, please let me know. You can hit me up on Facebook or Instagram (I’m quicker to respond on Insta, FYI) or email me via the contact form on my website, artcuriouspodcast.com. New Videos on YouTube this week include one where I act out the kinds of phone calls you get when you’re an art museum curator—that’s a fun one, I promise, and if you missed it, definitely check out the video with the kind of questions you get when you are an art history major. All of these things have happened to me, and I hope I can mine my slightly painful history for your humor. In the meantime, thank you for your support, your kind words, and for listening today—until next time, stay curious.
