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Newslinks

Art market
One of four versions of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, (pastel, 1895) fetched $119,9M (Sale price $107M + the buyer’s premium) at Sotheby’s New York on 2 May, a record for auction history. The sale was dominated by two telephone bidders, over a tense ten minutes period. Sotherby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer was caught exclaiming “I love you!” to one phone bidder when prices soared up to $106M. You can watch an excerpt here. We are all curious to know who won the bidding match for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Petter Olsen, the seller of the painting personally hoped the bidding winner to be MoMA NY…
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Review: Maurizio Cattelan – Puppet master pulling “All” the strings

Currently on view: New York
Maurizio Cattelan: All
at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
4 November 2011 – 22 January 2012


Maurizio Cattelan “All” (2011) Installation view. Photo by M-KOS

On the pay-what-you-wish evening we visited Guggenheim Museum, a long queue of people coiled around the block before flocking in to see Maurizio Cattelan’s current retrospective “All”. Precisely 128 works were hung from a ring at the top of the central rotunda, ranging from veristic wax figures, taxidermy animals, witty photographs, paintings and sculptures, spanning the breadth of Cattelan’s productions over the last 20 years. Instead of a predictably chronological order, the works were randomly placed, in an untidy but well mastered balancing act. The Italian artist literally turned the notion of a museum exhibition on its head, bypassing the use of the institution’s cloistered display areas to transform his retrospective into an expansive site-specific installation.
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