The Swiss architect (and VoCA favorite) Peter Zumthor has won the Pritzker Prize for excellence in “talent, vision and commitment” by a living architect.

Zumthor’s stunning Therme Spa in Graubünden. Image: mimoa.eu

Read the full article HERE

The 53rd Golden Lion awards for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Yoko Ono and John Baldessari at the opening of the Venice Biennale in June.

The unbelievably fabulous Yoko Ono. Image: arstechnica.com

Curator Daniel Birnbaum says: “Yoko Ono and John Baldessari have shaped our understanding of art and its relationship to the world in which we live. Their work has revolutionized the language of art and will remain a source of inspiration for generations to come.”

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After he launched Stuart, a social networking and portfolio showcase site for artists, and just when we were wondering what Charles Saatchi would get up to next, we’re entirely unsurprised by what he’s done. He’s launching a sort of Big Brother-slash-American Idol for emerging artists.

The world of young contemporary art(stardom) is already a circus by any measure, so why not declare it such with a reality television show?

Collector, ad man and UK celebrity Charles Saatchi. Image: artespain.com

Of course, it’s not the first art-related reality show. In 2006, New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch launched Artstar on Gallery HD, a specialty 24-hour channel devoted to the visual arts. Click HERE for the website and HERE for the New York Times’ take on the show.

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From Art Daily: The Museo del Prado and Google are today presenting the project “Masterpieces from the Prado on Google Earth”, which will allow users to see details invisible to the naked eye of 14 of the Museum’s masterpieces. Las Meninas, Gentleman with his Hand on his Breast and The Three Graces are among the paintings that have been photographed and which can now be seen on Google Earth by activating the buildings layer in 3d and clicking on Prado.

An upclose image of “Descent of Christ from the Cross” by Dutch Renaissance painter Rogier van der Weyden. Image: nationalpost.com

Check it out HERE

An exhibition by young Vancouver artist - and 2008 Sobey Art Prize winner - Tim Lee opens at the Hayward Project Space at the Hayward Gallery, London. The show is on from today until Sunday, 8 February 2009.

Comedian Steve Martin. Image: reneeashleybaker.com

In Untitled (Steve Martin), 2008, Lee re-enacts a 1970s stand-up routine by Steve Martin, a comic who once famously informed his audience that his entire act would consist of one joke, repeated over and over until the final curtain.

On Steve Martin’s first comedy album, Let’s Get Small, recorded live at San Francisco’s Boarding House in 1977, Martin says, now famously, “You just can’t play a depressing song on the banjo.”

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Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has been elected the Artistic Director of the documenta 13, which is scheduled to take place from June 9th, 2012 to September 16th, 2012 in Kassel, Germany.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Image: Ryszard Kasiewicz/documenta13.de

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev works as a curator and writer in Rome, Turin and New York. She is currently the Chief Curator at one of VoCA’s favorite museums, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin and was the Artistic Director for the 16th Sydney Biennale (2008).

From 1999 to 2001 she was Senior Curator of Exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center – a MoMA Affiliate. Previously, she organized exhibitions as an independent curator in different countries.

Pieces from Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, on until January 26, 2009 at P.S.1 in New York.

Check back here for updates on how she plans to shape the next Documenta, in 2012.

Artist Mark Leckey has won the Turner Prize.

He exhibited alongside Damien Hirst in the 1990 New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA but afterwards dropped from view, before making a “comeback” with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999.

Mark Leckey, Felix Gets Broadcasted 2007. Image: guardian.co.uk

Jonathan Jones of the Guardian loves this guy: “Mark Leckey is a fantastically creative example of this method. There’s a quality of William Burroughs’s cut-ups to his remorseless, frantic hybrid works of art, like his Soundsystem, which splices together fragments of high and low culture and everyday life, and his brilliant video The March of the Big White Barbarians, which weaves images of London’s 20th-century public art - all those clunking metal sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi - into a hypnotic, endlessly fascinating dream of the city’s secret life.”

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Notorious performance artist Istvan Kantor was arrested yesterday at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, for causing a ruckus at the Joseph Beuys exhibition Die Revolution Sind Wir (We are the revolution).

Two images from Kantor’s performance with MACHINESEXACTIONGROUP at the Museum Of Contemporary Art, Toronto, 2004. Image: ccca.ca

Kantor’s piece, a response to the title of the Beuys show, was called Und Wir Auch (And we too). It was positioned as a tribute to Beuys’ idea of a revolutionary creation that extends art into all aspects of life.

Kantor arrived to the museum with a video crew and was going to proceed with a silent posing action in front of Beuys works but when he tried to unroll and hold up a sign that said: ‘UND WIR AUCH’ (and we too), he got immediately surrounded by guards and pulled out with force from the exhibition.

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So…

“Late Friday afternoon Sotheby’s…reported that it had lost $28.2 million from guarantees at its contemporary art auctions last week. That brought its total losses to about $52 million this fall, all from guarantees. Executives at Christie’s…also admitted to having lost millions of dollars.”

Francis Bacon, Study for Self-Portrait, 1964. This painting, up for sale at Christie’s with a pre-sale estimate of $40 million US, failed to sell, despite the fact that a 1976 Bacon triptych went for $86.3 million in May.

However…

“Seasoned collectors…sat out the boom years and were now returning for what seemed like bargain prices. The Los Angeles financier Eli Broad, for example, could be seen near the front of the Sotheby’s salesroom last week and bought more than $8 million worth of art by Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg at an auction he called a “half-price sale.”

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In a turn of events that was bound to happen eventually, advertising agencies have realized they can exploit a recent change in the law to sell space in St. Mark’s Square, Venice and make a large profit. An enormous billboard-sized watch ad featuring the villain of a James Bond film dominates the square opposite the Doges’ palace.

The colonnade surrounding piazza San Marco in Venice. Image: Frederick Muller/photo.net

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