Yves Klein: Blenheim Palace’s fusty furnishings feel the shock of the blue

Ai Weiwei’s crabs, Lawrence Weiner’s texts, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s smashed mirrors and Jenny Holzer’s redacted military documents have all given the baroque pile of Blenheim Palace – home to the dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill – a jolt over the past few years. Inviting living artists to insinuate their works into this world heritage site, […]

100 Years of Dadaism – Influence and Genius of the First Avant-Garde Art Movement

“I could have done that” is a cynical statement that I’m sure we’ve all come across at some point. Some artists occasionally feel invited to respond rudely to the dilettantish comment (and sadly, very often with the similar amount of ignorance). The truth is that there was a series of events that preceded the multivalent […]

Marcel Duchamp

If you were to make a list of who you believe are the most controversial artists in history, the name of Marcel Duchamp would be topping many of the lists. He was a French painter, sculptor, writer and a master chess player whose work is often associated with Dadaism and branches of conceptual art, although he does not really seem […]

10 Famous Installation Artists Whose Work You Have to Know

In a plethora of different forms and styles, the emergence of installation artists has changed the face of art. Involving the configuration of installation of objects in a space, installation artpresents a unified experience practiced by an increasing number of postmodernist artists. Mostly temporary, installation art draws the viewer in, engaging them in multiple ways and making them a part of […]

Conceptual Art Movements and Examples

The Conceptual art movement is probably the most radical and the most controversial plane in modern and contemporary art. Some artists, experts and art historians even dismiss it as art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as […]

5 Empowering Artworks (and Exhibitions) Made During the Civil Rights Movement

Ai Weiwei proclaimed that “art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom.” When examining the civil rights movement, there is no doubt that art played a pivotal role in shaping and advancing the fight for equality. Throughout the era, countless artists reacted to issues of violent racism, segregation, and black identity in the United […]

The Artist Questioning Authorship

With ready-made materials and artifacts, Danh Vo’s art recasts the historical events and political ideas that have shaped his world. Danh Vo had just started to gain recognition as a rising young artist when he decided, in 2010, to make a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. He had been offered a one-man show at the Fridericianum, a […]

The Art Market Moves East: How Gagosian, David Zwirner, and 14 Other Western Art Businesses Are Trying to Expand to Asia

China has been described as “the largest growth market for the art business, anywhere.” See how auctioneers and dealers are tapping into it. In the past year alone, no fewer than six galleries have opened or announced plans to open an outpost or office somewhere in Asia. Amid announcement after announcement, it may feel like […]

What Is the Most Iconic Artwork of the 21st Century? 14 Art Experts Weigh In

How do you choose one defining artwork for a century still in its adolescence? Some of the art world’s leading figures take their best shot. Want to make an art historian laugh? Ask them to name the most iconic artwork of the 21st century. Turns out, it’s not so easy to single out the most […]

Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim

BEIJING — The signature work at “Art and China After 1989,” a highly anticipated show that takes over the Guggenheim on Oct. 6, is a simple table with a see-through dome shaped like the back of a tortoise. On the tabletop hundreds of insects and reptiles — gekkos, locusts, crickets, centipedes and cockroaches – mill about under […]

Rachel Whiteread Talks To Sue Hubbard About Her New Exhibition At Tate Britain

Trying to get hold of Rachel Whiteread to talk about her new exhibition at Tate Britain, her largest to date, is rather like attempting to gain an audience at the White House. The Tate only gives me a strict half an hour but she walks me round the show before it opens as the technicians beaver away, happy that […]

Conceptual Art Movement and Examples

The Conceptual art movement is probably the most radical and the most controversial plane in modern and contemporary art. Some artists, experts and art historians even dismiss it as art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the […]

As Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ Turns 100: 14 Iconic Artworks It Inspired

Discover the enduring legacy of the readymade in works by Manzoni, Koons, Hirst, Emin … Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain hardly needs an introduction. Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the work was originally submitted for display at the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York City. Famously rejected by the committee, Duchamp instead exhibited the work at Alfred […]

From Seminal Fluid to Sassy Scribbles: The “Non-Art” Works of Marcel Duchamp

Even after digesting this considerable amount of ostensibly transitory disclosure, Duchamp remains an unadulterated, irreverent enigma. While his readymades are a triumph of pure indifference over taste, admirers of Marcel Duchamp continue to be far from indifferent to this cryptic artist. By offering more than homage, Elena Filipovic’s The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, […]

Jonathan Jones’s top 10 art exhibitions of 2016

From great masterpieces by Caravaggio and Picasso to Georgiana Houghton’s hypnotic rediscovered paintings, this was a year full of stunning blockbusters. From Picasso, to Marcel Duchamp, to Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, AbEx, Girogione, Anselm Kiefer to William Kentridge, read on…!

artnet News Critics’ Picks: The Most Memorable Artworks of 2016

While 2016 may have been pretty awful on any number of fronts, we have to admit that it also gave us a lot of pretty great art. Consider Maurizio Cattelan alone, who gave us a solid gold toilet to relieve ourselves on at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a real life donkey, pooping in the tent […]

Hans-Ulrich Obrist tops list of art world’s most powerful

Artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, dubbed ‘curator who never sleeps’, wins ArtReview’s accolade for second time.  Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries dubbed as the “curator who never sleeps”, has topped this year’s ArtReview Power 100 of the most influential people in the art world. It is the second time Obrist […]

Talk – Collecting Contemporary Art, Audain Art Museum, Whistler, Canada

Laing Brown is an art collector who is interested in ideas. Brown, chair of the Audain Art Museum acquisitions committee and an external advisor to the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Canada, has just returned from Britain, where he went to check out Frieze London, where 160 of the world’s top commercial galleries […]

Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?

Dr James Fox has never really got conceptual art. And he’s not alone. Conceptual art has been treated with suspicion and incredulity by virtually everyone outside the art world for nearly a hundred years. Ever since Marcel Duchamp first displayed a signed urinal and claimed it was art in 1917.  So was he taking the […]

Public Talk: Collecting Contemporary Art

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – Sir Winston Churchill Join Laing Brown, a noted art collector, Board Member and Chair of the Audain Art Museum Acquisitions Committee, for a public multi-media presentation where he will discuss his Top 10 Collecting Rules for contemporary […]