ArtPrize bows out in favor of new format, partnership

About 13 years after its debut and more than $6 million in awards and grants, the renowned ArtPrize contest in west Michigan will bow out and a new format will take its place through a partnership, officials announced Thursday.

The effort, slated to be called "ArtPrize 2.0," is expected to "build upon the legacy of the international art competition," representatives said in a statement.

Downtown Grand Rapids Inc., the city of Grand Rapids and Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University are leading the initiative.

"While there are certainly mixed emotions, we know the time is right to conclude the original ArtPrize experiment and open up space for new energy and creativity," said Rick DeVos, ArtPrize founder and chairman. "We are thrilled that the partnership of DGRI, KCAD, and the City of Grand Rapids is stepping forward to continue to produce an incredible fall event."

Via Detroit News

The Chicago origin — and breakdown — of Jerry Saltz, the everyman’s art critic

Decades before he became arguably the most important art critic in America, long ago when print was king and being the most important art critic in America meant having the gravitas to influence the direction of the art world itself, Jerry Saltz vowed to stand outside of the art world looking in. Being from Chicago helped. Having a minuscule studio near the Red Line in the Loop helped. Meeting outsider Chicago artists like Joseph Yoakum and Lee Godie, and having grown up without much art at all, helped. Becoming a self-taught artist, and showing more affinity early on for the ancient art in the Field Museum than the celebrated art movements splashed across the Art Institute, that helped, too. As Saltz would write many years later, he loved that the Field was full of art removed from the burdens and judgments of the art world.

Via Chicago Tribune

The Architect Behind New York’s Most Exciting New Building

This past spring, architect Jeanne Gang stood on the western edge of the natural history museum’s campus and watched as concrete spewed into the air through mechanized nozzles, clotting like wet snow around skeletons of wire and steel rebar to form the substance of her firm Studio Gang’s latest building. More like a landscape carved by wind and water than any kind of human creation, the six-story structure at West 79th Street and Columbus Avenue flows out of an opening between a clutch of existing buildings and announces itself to the world through a 65-foot-tall portal of glass, beckoning to be explored.

Via WSJ

Monumental Warhol ‘Car Crash’ Painting to Sell at Sotheby’s for More Than $80 M.

An Andy Warhol painting from his famed “Death and Disasters” series will be auctioned during Sotheby’s marquee New York sales, where it could become one of the most expensive works by the artist ever publicly sold.

Estimated to fetch a price in excess of $80 million, White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times), from 1963, will be sold on November 16 during a contemporary art evening sale. It is headed to auction without a financial guarantee, which means that there is still the possibility that it may not find a buyer.

Via ARTnews