Contemporary Art Daily

Many smaller museums in Europe and America raise funds for their programming in part by auctioning works donated by galleries and artists. Nearly all of them allow absentee bidding from outside collectors, but despite this excellent pieces sometimes go for well under their retail value or aren’t sold at all. Presumably there are many collectors interested in many of these pieces, but it’s time consuming and difficult to keep track of when these auctions are happening and what’s worth considering.

We’re interested in developing a project to track the best of these benefit auctions and present selections from the available works. The purpose of this project would be both to support the institutions in their fundraising efforts and to provide collectors access to opportunities that too-often fly under the radar.

In addition to soliciting feedback (please e-mail us or leave a comment if this is something that interests you), we want to try a pilot program: selections from The Renaissance Society‘s upcoming auction. Our pursuit of the project in the future will depend in part on the response to this publicity, so if you find out about the auction here and decide to bid, let us know. The Renaissance Society, an excellent museum for contemporary art in Chicago, are friends of Contemporary Art Daily and manage every year to pull together some astonishingly good artworks from many of the galleries and artists we’ve covered. Their 2010 auction, which takes place on Saturday, September 11, is no exception. You can place advance bids on the museum’s website until Thursday, September 9, and you don’t have to be present to bid. An agent will bid on your behalf up to your maximum bid, but you may win the item for much lower if no one bids against you.

A few highlights from artists we’ve featured include an exemplary painting by Uwe Henneken (pictured above), a watercolor by Raoul de Keyser, a seminal projector work by Michael Reidel, a sculpture by Monika Sosnowska, a pair of beautiful Chinese plates appropriated by Danh Vo, a suite of “Performance Posters” by Falke Pisano and strong works by Alex Hubbard, Amy Granat, Hans Joerg Mayer, Morgan Fischer and many other artists.

The full list is here.

Beginning August 1st, Contemporary Art Daily will begin our second annual August Review. Throughout the month of August, when the art world grinds to a halt and few new shows are opened, we will take the opportunity to reflect on the most memorable exhibitions from the 2009 – 2010 season, one each day. These items will be labeled with “AR: ” in the title, which will help distinguish them from new shows. A trickle of new exhibitions will continue to be published as well, but at an aptly lower frequency.

You can visit last year’s August Review Index to see a selection of key shows from last year.

Contemporary Art Daily is proud to announce the inception of our sponsorship program. We will do our best to work with relevant, credible sponsors and avoid compromising the experience of visiting the site. If you have any comments or concerns, please don’t hesitate to e-mail us.

Companies interested in sponsoring the website may visit our Sponsorship page for further information. To avoid conflict of interest, we do not accept sponsorship by galleries, museums or individual artists.

We would also like to thank the Painting and Drawing MFA Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, our inaugural sponsor.

As you may have noticed, we made a few alterations to the layout of Contemporary Art Daily. Please let us know if you experience any problems, or have any thoughts about the changes.

Due to a number of requests, we’ve set up an automated Tumblr feed of Contemporary Art Daily items: contemporaryartdaily.tumblr.com/ Be sure to follow us.

In the coming days, Contemporary Art Daily will present exclusive documentation of five selected artists from the current Whitney Biennial. Please look forward to it!

After many, many requests, Contemporary Art Daily has set up an automated Twitter feed: @cadaily

As you may have noticed, we have added a slideshow feature to our image galleries.  Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to a larger version of that image within a slideshow, where you can easily move through the entire set of images. You can still access full-size image files by clicking on an image in the slideshow.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts about this new feature.

Thank you to all of our readers for a staggeringly successful first year. Contemporary Art Daily’s growth has exceeded our wildest hopes.

We are constantly looking to improve the site, so if you’d like to give us a birthday present, send some feedback or suggestions to info@contemporaryartdaily.com. How can we improve the way the site works? What sorts of shows are underrepresented? Overrepresented? Is there content apart from exhibitions you’d like to see included? How do you feel about Contemporary Art Daily? We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Thanks again.