Art

On February 1, 2024, Sotheby’s auction house announced a new fee structure that came as something of a surprise to the art world. For decades, Sotheby’s and its competitors have been one-upping each other with respect to the fees charged to buyers and sellers. While these fees have unquestionably increased the profitability of the auction houses themselves, in their complexity they have often bewildered auction participants and market observers alike. In theory at least, that may be about to change. Beginning this spring, Sotheby’s new fees will be both lower and potentially easier for all parties to understand. They apply to sellers consigning lots for auction after April 15, and to buyers beginning on May 20.

I arrived in the city of Figueres early one January morning to visit one of the most popular, and bizarre, art museums in the world, the Teatre-Museu Gala Salvador Dalí. It houses a dreamlike picture that, for the first time since it left over seventy years ago, has made a temporary return journey to Spain. Originally simply titled “The Christ,” the 1951 canvas depicting the giant figure of a man on a cross, shown at an overhead angle hovering over a moody seascape, was painted by the most famous son of Figueres, Salvador Dalí. Through April 30, it forms the centerpiece of a show exploring its creation, history, local connections and symbolism.

What do you generally think of when you hear the words “Scottish art”? There are the usual clichés of course, of large-scale landscape paintings depicting gorse and heather and startled-looking wildlife, or alternatively there are the portraits of various noblemen and worthies, many of whom have the well-fed hue that living high on the hog imbues. If you head to Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland — often simply known as “the National” — and visit the traditional collection in the neoclassical building right in the center of the city, near the castle and major shopping streets, you won’t be disappointed by the eclectic selection of Old Masters and Scottish masterpieces alike.

“This is why I hate art.” “Why, because this is pants?” A friend and I were at a contemporary art show, standing before a mixed-media work featuring trite sayings, glittery flowers and a spaniel. A few days earlier I had suggested to her — once rather ominously described to me as an “art philistine” — that a visit to a few local galleries might provide an opportunity to acquire art for the new home that she and her fiancé recently purchased in the area. Somewhat to my surprise she agreed, so one evening we trundled along to some exhibition openings, to see what we might find. Our first venue, housing three exhibition under one roof, was quite crowded when we arrived. The works ran the gamut from installations and video art to painting, drawing and collage.

The career of artist Alberto Guerrero has been driven by an overarching desire to look for what is behind everything that we merely, and only dimly, perceive at present. The work of the forty-something Madrid-based Guerrero ranges from abstract, highly textured canvases and three-dimensional images which he calls “spherical paintings” to realistic presentations of daily life — such as his illustrated book Diary of a Quarantine showing life in the Guerrero household during Covid — and deeply reflective images of sacred art. There are few contemporary artists who have such a broad range and vision.

More and more often lately, people are rejecting tired modern art. They often find solace in the art of the past; online accounts admiring “traditional art” have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, but they act as online repositories for a bittersweet recognition: what once was, no longer is. But the kind of art they seek, involving detail, meaning and skill, still exists, and it is growing. The cultural hegemony of contemporary, abstract art is slowly beginning to crack; through those cracks we can see new art surfacing. As I have become increasingly disillusioned with the state of politics, an observation from Ernst Jünger, the German philosopher and skeptic of the extreme politics of his day, rings true to me.

The seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is certainly having a moment, thanks to the enormous popularity of the retrospective of his work that concluded at the Rijksmuseum in June. Demand to see the gathering-together of twenty-eight of the thirty-seven currently known paintings by the Old Master far outstripped supply; the show sold out within two days of opening, and scalpers were allegedly reselling tickets online for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. It’s certainly not difficult to understand why people would flock to see Vermeer’s work, thanks to his beautiful brushwork and sensitively lit compositions.

In the years before the French Revolution saw heads roll down the boulevards, revolutionaries murdered in the bath, and endless numbers of fluffy lap dogs forced to fend for themselves after their mamans met their untimely ends, one art critic made his name with his fearless criticism of Paris’s annual art exhibition, the “Salon.” The prominent style in mid- and late-eighteenth century France was Rococo — think impossibly ornate, gold-swirled furniture; paintings of pink, fluffy nymphs in gilt-edged, asymmetrical frames; and portraits of women in dresses so large, and so embellished, that they resemble iced wedding cakes more than human beings. In the face of endless walls of this style of art, the critic Denis Diderot was caustic.

Milton Glaser was among the most celebrated graphic designers in the world, honored with one-man shows at such glittering institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Glaser was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts award. His “I ♥ New York” logo has been emulated everywhere, and his Push Pin Studios set the standard for graphic design outfits around the world, likely creating more theater posters and magazine covers than any other in New York. But when Glaser pitched one of his “dotty landscape paintings” to the 2017 Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) call for artists, its Art & Design judges turned him down. Glaser took the rejection in his stride.