Harald Szeemann’s Revolutionary Curating

A re-creation of the auteur’s most personal show, madly grand and deadpan daft, essentializes a strange glamour that has leaked from the art world into culture at large. The most bizarre exhibition in town this summer bears on the prevalence, lately, of “curating” as an honorific for the organizing of practically anything by just about anyone. […]

Five Artists Who Have Changed the Way We See Neon

Seedy motels, fast food joints and the romantic underbelly of urban life are all synonymous with the warm artificial glow of neon. Since the 1920s, the commercialization of “liquid fire” has seen countless industries quite literally put their name up in lights, and although other more high-tech forms of illumination are now available, no other […]

Bruce Nauman Reappears: Pay Attention

“Disappearing Acts” lets us see with clarity where the artist stands and why he is pertinent to our wrenching moment. If art isn’t about life and death, and the emotions and ethics that surround them, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? Some artists focus on those, but the most interesting head for the uncool existential […]

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 […]

“Green Imposes Its Discomfiting Mood”: The History of Green and the Work of Bruce Nauman, Brice Marden, and Olafur Eliasson

Textbooks tend to organize art history chronologically. But what if we re-told art history through color instead? Artspace is publishing a series of articles excerpted from Phaidon‘s Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art, each one offering a close look into the history of a single color in its relation to art. Last week we examined red, […]

Real Estate for the 1 Percent, With Art for the Masses

THE sculptor Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” For most of the last century, residential and commercial developments in New York City tended to marry architecture and art with that […]

7 Video Art Masterpieces You Need to Know Now

Video art has been with us for nearly half a century, a fertile ground for artists to experiment with new modes of aesthetic experience. As media culture expanded to nearly every corner of our society over the course of the 20th century, artists in turn refined and emboldened their approaches to the medium. The following […]

Why Bruce Nauman’s Persistent Market Defies Trophy Hunters

Bruce Nauman is considered a towering and influential figure in postwar American art. His reputation as a master of minimalist and conceptual art was cemented more than four decades ago when he was first showing with Leo Castelli in New York and in important European shows like “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern […]

An Introduction to Process Art (Or, How Minimalism Went From Pretty to Gritty)

The common refrain, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” could make a perfect catchphrase for Process Art. A movement that arose in the 1960s and ’70s and has since expanded in definition to describe a general philosophical approach to making art, Process Art places its emphasis on the process and act of artistic creation rather than the […]

Yvon Lambert Moved to Tears At Inauguration of Collection Lambert Museum in Avignon

It was a visibly emotional event for veteran art dealer Yvon Lambert. On July 10, Lambert celebrated the long-awaited inauguration of the newly-expanded space of the Collection Lambert in Avignon with high-profile guests and politicians in attendance, including French culture minister Fleur Pellerin. The permanent hanging of Lambert’s contemporary art collection in the newly-acquired Hôtel de […]

Patrick Painter – The Genuine Article

JOHN NEWSOM: So, how did you discover art? What was your ‘eureka’ moment? PATRICK PAINTER: Well, when I was 28, I was living in Paris, and I was working for an insurance company, Metropolitan Life. One day I said to myself, “I don’t know anything about art, so I’m gonna start looking at art.” It’s […]

Top 10 Most Expensive Living American Artists – artnet News

Next up in our series of the world’s most expensive living artists: the Americans. Auction results reveal both the usual suspects as well as some surprises, making this list more diverse than might have been expected. Some of these artists are auction darlings with thousands of works on the block, while others have had nary […]

Gormley to Hirst: today’s top artists on the genius of Henry Moore

Ahead of an exhibition of Moore’s work alongside that of today’s artists, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Bruce Nauman and others talk about seeing bubbles in hula-hoops, sculpting from the gut – and how Moore changed what was possible.

10 Exhibitions That Changed the Course of Contemporary Art

If the title of Jens Hoffmann‘s latest exhibition. “Other Primary Structures,” rings a bell, it’s because it’s a revisiting one of the most important American art exhibitions of the 20th century: “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” the 1966 exhibition organized at the same museum by the pathbreaking curator Kynaston McShine that changed the aesthetic course of American art. […]

When a Form Is Given Its Room to Play

‘A World of Its Own,’ Examining Photography, at MoMA. Something old, something new, nothing borrowed and not enough color. A variation on the venerable bridal dress code pretty much sums up the Museum of Modern Art’s latest foray into its photography collection, “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio.” In turn, the title of […]

A Squiggly, Neon-Lit Guide to Post-Minimalism

More so than Post-Impressionism or Post-Modernism, the genre of art known as Post-Minimalism is a particularly squirrely one to wrap one’s mind around—after all, what is there beyond Minimalism’s elegant reduction of art to pure form? The critic Roberta Smith may have put it best a few years ago when she described it as “that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual,Process, […]

The Existential Hilarity (or Hilarious Existentialism?) of Jonathan Monk

The artist Jonathan Monk makes work that casts an arch eye on art history, his fellow artists, and the transition of a work from the studio to the gallery to the collector’s wall or museum. In other words, his target is art and the entire artistic process, which he lampoons with wry humor and an unabashed use […]

Paint by Numbers – Who are the six greatest living artists?

This provocative, perhaps unanswerable question is worth asking for what it reveals about a cultural arena in which money and fame often seem to be the paramount obsessions. Surveying the results fromV.F.’s poll of top artists, academics, and curators, Mark Stevens creates a portrait of the art world today and identifies the values that really […]