This Week in Art News
Mapping America’s Artists, Art Market Ripples & More
Each week, we scour the internet for the most significant, surprising, and outrageous art news—helping you stay informed (and sound smart). Have a suggestion? Let us know on social media (@meetmeural) with the tag #thisweekinartnews. (See all installments.)
Calling all geographers and city aficionados! This map from the Times seeks to answer the question, “What if you mapped the major American artists of the past century, in the years they appeared in the nation’s most prestigious exhibition?” (Also known as the Whitney.) The answer might not be as shocking as the article’s slow reveal might imply, but it’s still chock-full of maps you could pore over for days. Where exactly did Edward Hopper live in Manhattan? What about Marsden Hartley? When did L.A. become such an artist mecca? Where are New York’s artists living today? The answers may or may not surprise you, but there’s only one way to find out.
How convenient. According to the Independent, you have 30 more items on your bucket list—and all but a handful can be found right on your Meural Canvas. Its list of 30 seminal artworks covers many you’ve heard of—like Mona Lisa, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Birth of Venus, and The Kiss—and a few you probably never have. It also includes a brief description of why, exactly, we should care about each one.
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For an article proposing we never see smiles in art history, there sure are quite a few on display. It’s really more of the history of the smile in art, which doesn’t begin with the oft-cited starting point, the Mona Lisa, but Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Young Man. Messina “introduced the smile into his portrait paintings to indicate the inner lives of his realistically rendered sitters.” From there, smiles came to imbue a wide range of symbolism and meaning, including general mirth, sexual availability, and even “sinister sociopolitical meanings” and “political criticism,” as in the work of the Chinese Cynical Realist Yue Minjun.
A few weeks ago we reported on the sale of Sotheby’s. The worlds of finance and, more so, art were shaken. It seemed no one knew what to make of the move, but now that the dust has settled, analyses are popping up. This one, from Artsy, claims there will be three major consequences: 1) “The end of auction-world transparency,” 2) “Vertical integration, disintegrating,” and 3) “Room for two at the market’s peak.” The first may be self-explanatory. The second refers to Sotheby’s recent practice of widely expanding its offerings—and the fact that it may stop. The third posits that now that Sotheby’s is private, it can rightfully compete with Christie’s, which is already private. Of course, this is boiling things down quite a bit. For a more thorough explanation, head to the article.
