A Distant View of the Frieze Art Fair, Larry Gagosian on the Trouble With India, and More Art News

- THE BIG STORY -

Are you feeling relatively rested, not visually overstimulated, and sober? Chances are you're not at the Frieze Art Fair, where the art world's power elite has convened this week for the latest edition of the lavish and widely beloved cutting-edge souk to sip champagne and look at a tightly vetted selection of artworks from the world's leading galleries. The early word from the aisles is that things are going swimmingly-far better than the dismal London auctions have fared, to say the least (see below)-with strong early sales like a $1.3 million Paul McCarthy sculpture selling at Hauser & Wirth in the first ten minutes, and evidently exquisite works on view. (Watch Judd Tully, aka The Master, provide a sprightly tour of the fair here, or watch a no-talk-all-eye-candy video from Vernissage TV here.) And as if the contemporary offerings weren't enough to overwhelm the hardiest aesthete, this year marked the debut of Frieze Masters, a new fair mixing old and new art that the Financial Times's veteran art market reporter Jackie Wullschlagerhas called "the most enjoyable fair or biennale I have ever experienced," which is really saying something.

A note from the perspective of a desk-bound art observer: in that Tully video, note the contents of Andrea Rosen's booth. In introducing Ryan Trecartin as her big new addition to the gallery, she is displaying both the artist's enormously acclaimed videos and also the sculptural environments and props that he built for them. As a positioning strategy it may be brilliant, following Barbara Gladstone's example of selling Matthew Barney's props as individual sculptures and thus supercharging his market far more than would be possible if only his videos, a notorious hard sell, were offered. And since Rosen is expanding her already generous gallery with a second space, she'll have plenty of room to display Trecartin's object-based side in a way we haven't seen before (outside museums, at least).

- QUOTE OF THE WEEK -

"Giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature. It's shameful for the committee to have made this selection which does not live up to the previous quality of literature in the award…. [Mo Yan has] no involvement with the contemporary struggle…. You can never separate literature and struggle from today's current political situation." - Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei slamming the Nobel Prize committee for bestowing this year's top literary prize to Mo Yan, a quasi social-realist novelist without political edge. (Roberta Smith, meanwhile, disagrees somewhat in her not-very-positive review of Ai's new Hirshhorn show, saying: "Today we need all the great art and all the political agitation we can get. But it may be too much to expect that both will emanate with any frequency from the same person.")

- MUST READ -

Creative Time Reports Makes Groundbreaking Launch - The politically engaged New York nonprofit Creative Time has debuted its fascinating new editorial Web site, a project led by editor Marisa Katz that will publish content created by and with artists to address the pressing political and social issues of the day. (Gallerist NY)

The Met Puts Its Catalogues Online - As part of its concerted campaign to bring the venerable museum into the digital age (by, say, partnering with Artspace), the Met has put many of its catalogues online for free perusal. (NYT)

Why Is Wade Guyton Such a Market (and Critical) Darling? - In the wake of the opening of the artist's salivated-over Whitney retrospective, Rachel Corbett consults a series of prominent art experts to find out what's behind Guyton's "weird perfect storm" of adulation. (Artinfo)

Carracci Gallery to Be Rejuvenated - The city of Rome will work with the World Monuments Fund to sponsor a $1.5 million renovation of Palazzo Farnese's famed a Baroque treasure, which Annibale and Agostino Carracci created in the 17th century to glorify Alessandro Farnese (aka Pope Paul III). (NYT)

Sugimoto on Hunting Big Game With His Camera - The celebrated conceptual photographer, whose black-and-white photos of the sea are being pared with Rothkos for Pace's inaugural London show, talks to Randy Kennedy about his mysterious and atmospheric art. (NYT)

Not Named After the Mona Lisa One - Get to know Melia Mardin, the Harvard-educated journalist-turned-chef (and daughter of "art-world power couple Brice and Helen Marden") who runs the popular culturati canteen the Smile. (NYT)

Artists and Cosmetics Companies Team Up -Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and other artists have joined art stars Cindy Sherman, Richard Phillips, and Marilyn Minter in creating designs for cosmetic products, just another instance of art and fashion making common cause. (NYT)

Oakland Art Murmur Explodes - The monthly gallery crawl has grown into a giant event that draws 20,000 art lovers to the city's downtown. (NYT)

Gertrude Stein's Salon Is in SoHo? - Like many people, you may never have heard about the Salon de Fleurus, a recreation of the Modernist writer and art patron's fabled Paris apartment (which displayed seminal works by Picasso, Matisse, and others) that has been installed for years on Mulberry and Mott. (NYT)

- ART MARKET -

"The Art World Is Never Going to Be Popular Like the NFL" - Megadealer Larry Gagosian doles out one of his rare interviews to the Wall Street Journal's Kelly Crow (who profiled him in 2011 and has been knocking it out of the park lately). In it, he points out that "more people are buying art" across price points and says compelling things about the challenges of breaking into the Indian art market (they buy local), how ArtRio was "one of the strongest fairs we've ever done," and why he thinks the global art market is going through a "strengthening" period. (WSJ)

Christie's Limps Through London Contemporary Sale - The leading auction house barely cleared its low estimate with the unenthusiastic $36.8 million evening sale, though work by Fred Tomaselli, Cy Twombly, and a few other big names did well. (Artinfo)

Phillips de Pury Fares Even Worse - The house fell $4 million shy of its low estimate with the $19.4 million evening sale, with 33 percent of the lots being bought in, though a few star lots by Christopher Wool, Damien Hirst, and Louise Bourgeois fetched high prices. (Artinfo)

Sotheby's Islamic Art Sale Tanks Completely - The London sale failed to find buyers for a whopping 56 percent of the art it offered in the $6 million sale, as Souren Melikian reports in a withering dispatch that at the same time brims with voluptuous appreciation of the works themselves. (NYT)

Sotheby's Contemp Bucks the Trend (With Help From God) - A dash of star power helped change the week's auction narrative, with Eric Clapton's Gerhard Richter painting selling for an artist-record $34.2 million to fuel an overall $70.8 million sale, almost $10 million above the high estimate. (Artinfo)

China Guardian Thrives Too - Even in the midst of a luxury-buying downturn in the country as it nervously awaits its political transition, the mainland Chinese auction house enjoyed a gangbusters $58.6 million sale when it debuted its new Hong Kong salesroom. (Artinfo)

Watch a Video of the PAD Art Fair - Artinfo's Nicolai Hartvig leads a virtual tour of the London edition of the Pavilion of Art and Design. (Artinfo)

Lehmann Maupin Plans Hong Kong Outpost - The gallery will open its first location outside of New York next year in a site designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas in Hong Kong's historic Pedder Building, and the inaugural show will feature work by the gallery's Asian artists. (Lehmann Maupin)

- IN & OUT -

The New Museum has hired Joanna Burton, the esteemed director of the graduate program at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies, to replace Eungie Joo as its director and curator of education and public engagement, taking over "the Fifth Floor Education Center, our acclaimed programs for high school students, the Museum as Hub global partnership, and the many multidisciplinary performance and discussion programs presented throughout the year in the Museum's Peter J. Sharpe Theater," the museum states. (New Museum)

The Lower East Side's Renwick Gallery is changing its name to Leslie Fritz (in honor of its owner) and moving to a new space at 44 Hester Street. (Gallerist NY)

Peter Freeman Gallery now represents the estate of the late outsider artist James Castle. (Gallerist NY)

The Serralves Museum in Portugal has hired Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curator Suzanne Cotter to take over as director, while the Guggenheim's still-in-progress satellite is hoped to open sometime in 2017. (Gallerist NY)

Creative Time director Anne Pasternack gave the nonprofit's annual $25,000 Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change to the artist Fernando Garcí­a-Dory, whose work "engage[s] one of the world's most underrepresented and-at a population of an estimated 250 million-widespread communities: pastoralist and nomadic peoples." (Creative Time)

Artist and elementary school art teacher Adonna Khare, a 32-year-old draftswoman, has won this year's $200,000 ArtPrize, marking yet another time the Grand Rapids, Michigan, award has gone to a giant, hyper-detailed drawing. (In the Air)