Clean, Well-Lighted Places: On Our Nostalgia for the Golden Age of Art Dealing

The notion that collectors sit atop the hierarchy of today’s art world is axiomatic. They build private museums and control the boards of traditional ones. Through their acquisitions, they determine the fates of artists, and often overshadow curators, historians, and critics—all those ink-stained intellectuals who used to play a larger role in determining art’s value. […]

Kienholz’s Five Car Stud goes back on view in Milan

For nearly 40 years, Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969-72), a dark installation depicting a brutal racist attack, lay hidden away in storage in Japan. It is now on public view in Milan at the Fondazione Prada, which acquired the work in 2012, soon after it was restored by the artist’s widow and collaborator Nancy […]

Michelangelo Pistoletto: the artist with a smashing way to save the world

Pistoletto shook up the 60s with his arte povera revolution. What’s the legendary mirror-smasher doing now? Designing houses made of rice at his eco HQ. Born in Biella in 1933, Pistoletto grew up under fascism. “You had to believe – in God and in Mussolini. I felt there was a terrible contradiction in believing in a […]

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. […]