My Life As a Failed Artist – Jerry Saltz

Decades after giving up the dream for good, an art critic returns to the work he’d devoted his life to, then abandoned — but never really forgot. It pains me to say it, but I am a failed artist. “Pains me” because nothing in my life has given me the boundless psychic bliss of making […]

Team Gallery’s Jose Freire on Why He Is Quitting Art Fairs for Good – Part I

The veteran art dealer explains why he has soured on the art market’s central apparatus. The central driver of the modern-day art market, at least when it comes to galleries, is art fairs. They promise efficiency: for a hefty booth fee (plus travel and shipping costs), dealers from around the world can convene in a […]

Coming Face to Face With Jimmie Durham

The sculptor’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum is a “brilliant, half-century-long act of politically driven self-invention,” our critic writes. “I feel fairly sure that I could address the entire world if only I had a place to stand,” the peripatetic American artist Jimmie Durham said in the 1980s. Now he has that place: the fifth […]

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 […]

Beyond Supply and Demand: How Artworks are Priced?

The pricing of artworks is not a simple matter. And while the basic economic principles of supply and demand do still apply to the art market, the factors that contribute to an artist’s “supply,” or the availability of their art for sale, and an artist’s “demand,” or how many collectors are willing to buy their […]

Jordan Wolfson review – shock jock with a baseball bat

A giant marionette dangles on a chain, rats smoke, a boy dances in urine and the artist beats a man to death … a controversial new show explodes in a frenzy of cartoon sex and violence. A virtual reality headset over my eyes, headphones over my ears, a gallery assistant helps me grab the metal […]

Art Goes Political, but Will That Fly on the London Market?

This will be remembered as a year when art got seriously political. The Whitney Biennial in New York and the inaugural Athens edition of Documenta are just two of the high-profile exhibitions trying to convey and confront the tumult of our times. Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket,” showing the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, the […]

All the Artists and National Pavilions in the 2017 Venice Biennale

The 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Viva Arte Viva” by curator Christine Macel, has released the list of 120 participating artists and its national pavilions. “In a world full of conflicts and jolts, in which humanism is being seriously jeopardized, art is the most precious part of the human being,” Macel has said […]

Here Comes the Whitney Biennial, Reflecting the Tumult of the Times

FOR the first time in 20 years, the lead-up to the Whitney Biennial coincided with the presidential election, a background that could not help but inform the selection of artists and artwork that will be on view when the biennial opens on March 17, the first in the museum’s new downtown building. “An election year […]

How the Artist Adrian Ghenie Became an Auction Star

Many say it was the 2011 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi museum in Venice that first ignited art buyers’ interest in a young Romanian artist named Adrian Ghenie, whose heavy palette-knife paintings are haunted by historical figures like Stalin, Hitler and the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Then, in 2015, Mr. Ghenie drew more attention when […]

MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

When the influential Museum of Modern Art curator Laura Hoptman claims that she’s “a painting person,” it’s no joke. A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, she built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Why the Art World Is Desperately Seeking Forgotten Artists

In May, the painter Carmen Herrera surveyed her first US solo show in a decade at New York’s Lisson Gallery and wept with joy. She had ample reason to. Besides being represented by one of the world’s most important galleries, she had canvases on view in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the […]

Jordan Wolfson’s Hypnotic Abuse At Zwirner

Here are a few negative things you could say about Jordan Wolfson’s show: It’s dumb. It’s a spectacle. It’s loud. But you know what? This dumb, loud spectacle is one of the more thoughtful, oddly contemplative experiences you can have in Chelsea right now. During my visit the kinetic piece (titled, with sarcastic nonchalance, Colored sculpture) attracted […]

See the 6 Most Haunting Humanoids in Art

This year’s Met Gala saw many of its high-profile attendees looking like cyborgs as its theme, Manus x Machina, commented on the growing influence of tech on the fashion world. But the impact of electronic media and technology on contemporary life is also being reflected in the art world. Over the past few years there […]

Jordan Wolfson’s Creepy Robot Art Reboots Jeff Koons

Jordan Wolfson’s art delights me a little—which may be a strange thing to say for an artist whose most recent installation centers on a human-like robot being brutally tortured for the entertainment of its spectators. But Wolfson (b. 1980) delights me because I have this hypothesis that contemporary art—one of its strands, at least, particularly the […]

How Galleries Can Get the Most From Art Fairs

With unstable markets and cautious collectors, art dealers everywhere are adopting leaner strategies that make the most of their gallery’s resources. Driving 40% of annual gallery revenue, according to TEFAF’s 2015 Art Market Report, art fairs remain a crucial part of the bottom line, providing global reach without the need for multiple locations. The opacity of […]

Alec Soth’s Case Studies of America

“Our vision of America is so shaped by television and movies. All we see are Hollywood starlets and New York cops. We sometimes forget that there are whole other lives being lived in the middle of America. And some of these lives are really inspiring.” —Alec Soth, as told to SeeSaw Magazine in 2004

The Art of Espionage: Six Contemporary Artists Who Think Like Super-Spies

Voyeurism is, for many artists, a necessary part of the creative process. But some take the act of watching the unaware a step further, into surveillance or espionage. As the 2011 SF MoMA and Tate Modern show “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870” reminded us, these activities have been going on in art […]