Distraught over the death of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart, he repeated, “It could have been me.” “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim, is a small but timely and often surprising powerhouse of a historical show pegged to a not very good scrap of painting by a star-dusted name. The exhibition includes photographs, […]
The rise and fall of Damien Hirst is an oft-told tale of hubris and nemesis. An art-world superstar in the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, Hirst made white-hot works—the most infamous of which involved animals immersed in formaldehyde—whose prices only ever went up. He got rich, his galleries got rich, his collectors got rich, everybody was happy. But, then, […]
I remember when photographs by Louise Lawler, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, first hurt my feelings, some thirty years ago. They pictured paintings by Miró, Pollock, Johns, and Warhol as they appeared in museums, galleries, auction houses, storage spaces, and collectors’ homes. A Miró co-starred with its own reflection in […]
Life has been happier for many of us in the art world since we stopped caring about runaway commerce in art, which has seemed—but only seemed—to reduce all measures of aesthetic value to raw price. Sure, the billion-plus dollars shaken loose, since May, at three New York and London auctions of modern and contemporary works—with […]
Our final (so far) column on Chris Burden, by Peter Schjeldahl – you should read it. Burden adventured alone in wilds that aren’t outside civilized life but that seethe within it. He coolly structured convulsive experience. His mastery of form made him a poet, as in a piece that I knew from hearsay and wrote […]
When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’sheadline was typical of the coverage: “MIAMI ARTIST DESTROYS $1 MILLION AI WEIWEI VASE IN PROTEST.” Variations […]
This year, matters of art jazzed people who rarely look at art works, occasioning much highly general, though lively, chatter. By Peter Schjedahl, The New Yorker