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. […]

Think About It: 9 Masterpieces of Conceptual Art You Need to Know

As explained in Phaidon’s The Art Museum, the world’s most comprehensive exhibition of fine art to be collected and presented in book format (each page is its own gallery room!), Conceptual Art “is not meant to be looked at aesthetically, but to be thought about intellectually.” In the following excerpt, we present 9 distinct approaches to this […]

What It’s Like to Live With Art That Doesn’t Love You Back

At a time when art is as commodified as oil, a few collectors have chosen to buy works that are messy, perishable and threaten to take over their lives. PAUL LEONG, A YOUNG banker who lives in downtown Manhattan, spends an unusual amount of time thinking about square watermelons. He wonders where to get them, […]

In Philippe Parreno’s ‘H{N)Y P N(Y}OSIS,’ Art Is the Big Idea

When he was young, the French artist Philippe Parreno had a fantasy in which he would open his mouth and a beam of projector light would shoot out, casting his thoughts onto whatever was in front of him, medium and message in one human head. “My imagination would just be easy and available,” he once […]