Artists — at least the ones in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museums — have been known to make paintings on the heads of pins, but few of them would consider making art mainly from pins. Tara Donovan — a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” recipient — has previously assembled hundreds of thousands of them into sculptural cubes and inked their heads to make mesmerizing prints; but for her latest series of works, Donovan pushes gazillions of nickel-plated steel pins into white gatorboard to make optical-art drawings that are both stimulating and sublime.
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Because we can’t all escape from our desks to enjoy 72-degree weather and international contemporary art, Flavorpill’s resident guru Paul Laster will be bringing you daily bold-face name littered updates and photos from Art Basel Miami all week. If you missed the first two installments, read them here and here.
VIEW THE IMAGE GALLERY OF HIS EXPLOITS HERE
The art world scoop from Day Three after the jump…
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We just finished reading Sarah Thornton’s brilliantly readable and wonderful and didactic-without-lecturing book Seven Days in the Art World. And the thing that struck us, in between parsing the minutiae of Artforum vs artforum.com’s editorial relationship and trying to figure out how to reasonably make friends with L.A. gallerists Blum & Poe, was how much of a period piece it was.
Thornton’s book, which came out earlier this month, is, like most books, the product of years and years of research and (in her case, participant) observation and work and is so rooted in a time before now. What struck us the most about Seven Days, though, was how we were unable to read it without the feeling that this was a historical snapshot rather than a contemporary glimpse. Reading about collectors waiting like nervous racehorses before the opening of the Art Basel gates and seeing the way in which galleries controlled which buyers got access to which artists, how being on the list to buy a piece of art was as much an important accomplishment as the purely fiscal ability to acquire, all seemed like a dramatized version of a past we vaguely remember.
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