Art Theft: Protecting Your Collection
According to the FBI, 52% of art thefts in the U.S. happen in people’s home with only 10% of art thefts occurring in galleries. And of all that stolen art, only 5% is recovered. In American history, the largest art theft robbery was Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist of 1990, where the stolen artworks […]
American Abstraction: The CIA’s Art Collection Revealed
Trust the CIA to always be enveloped in a shroud of secrecy to the extent that it was once believed that even its art collection was heavily guarded and highly confidential. To be fair, the museum run by the CIA which is housed at its Langley headquarters and for obvious reasons, is not open to […]
Why Should I Catalogue My Art?
You’re an artist, a gallerist, a curator, an art collector. You love art—and you want others to love your art, too. How can you share your collection with your friends, family, other enthusiasts, and the world? An art catalogue (digital or print) is a great place to start. What Is An Art Catalogue? Remember the […]
Why Is Art So Expensive?
What would you do with $500 million? (We’re talking record-setting-Powerball money here.) Perhaps, pay off your student loans, buy a home, and take a really fabulous vacation—but that’s peanuts to $500 million. For that kind of money, you could buy this 28-bedroom medieval castle outside of Paris—10 times over. You could buy a hundred Koenigsegg […]
40 Years Later, We Still RSVP Yes To Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party
Picture a triangular table, 48 feet to a side. Along each side, there are 13 place settings—39 in all. Each setting has a runner embroidered in a unique style. Along the first side, the places are reserved for mythical and historical famous women from prehistory to the time of the Roman Empire. The second side […]
My Journey: In Search For The Ultimate Digital Art World
Oh Rembrandt and More Rembrandt.. My Inspiration In the second year of my Masters program at Christie’s, I interned at the Morgan Library and Museum’s Drawings and Prints Department as a curatorial researcher. After graduation, I was hired for the museum’s very first online art cataloguing project, “Corsair,” for the museum’s extraordinary Rembrandt prints (etchings) […]
How to Catalogue Art
For your own benefit as a collector, artist, gallerist, curator, or art enthusiast, you should keep an archive of your art—that’s a comprehensive record of each piece that lists its name, provenance, materials, contextual information, serial or edition number, and location. Your archive is a good way to organize and keep track of your collection […]
Vanta is the New Black?
Who owns the color red? That seems like an insane question—how can someone own a color?! Of course, lots of things seem crazy until people do them. Like Anish Kapoor, who now has exclusive ownership of the world’s blackest black. What Is The Blackest Black? Good question! It’s a carbon nanotube material developed by Surrey […]
Art: The Original Social Network
Why do we make art? Plenty of folks have tried to answer that question over the course of human history. Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Lacan, Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida—the roster of great thinkers who’ve tried to answer that question reads like a Greatest Hits list for philosophy students. For all those thousands and thousands of pages […]
Discovering Artists, Artworks and Collections on ARTDEX
Now that you’re an expert in creating collections and organizing your art it’s time to take a look at what other people are up to on ARTDEX! With just a few clicks, you can easily search for and discover new artists, artworks and collections that other users are sharing. To start log in to ARTDEX. […]
How To Archive Conceptual Art
It’s relatively easy to archive a painting, a drawing, a photograph, or even a sculpture—you can just take a picture (or several pictures) and add it to your files. Maybe they’re old-fashioned paper records or maybe it’s a digital archive, but the image is the central component. When we’re talking about conceptual art, however, it […]
How To Archive Performance Art
For 750 hours, Marina Abramović sat in a chair and stared at strangers. It was 2010 and this feat of endurance was part of her retrospective, The Artist Is Present, at MoMA. Thousands of people eagerly queued up for the privilege of staring back at her. A retrospective is a particularly interesting venue for a […]