From Van Gogh to Richter—what happens when bidders fail to pay up at auction?

Flaky winning bids are knocking the gloss off record-breaking sales. Shortly before Christie’s sale of post-war and contemporary art in New York on 15 November 2017, the auction house learnt of a potential new bidder: a little-known Saudi prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud. According to the New York Times, a scramble […]

First look at Rachel Whiteread’s suburban house sculpture in London’s new US Embassy

Sections of an all-American home have been mounted on the walls. A major new public art work by Rachel Whiteread modelled on a suburban US house will be unveiled next week at the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, south London. The wall sculpture, titled US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015), will greet embassy visitors as […]

Galleries hit by cyber crime wave

Hackers are stealing large sums of money from art galleries and their clients using a straightforward email deception. The Art Newspaper has so far identified nine galleries or individuals targeted by this scam. They include Hauser & Wirth, the London-based dealers Simon Lee, Thomas Dane, Rosenfeld Porcini and Laura Bartlett and, in the US, Tony […]

Jenny Holzer: Words of Conflict

As three new commissions open this year in the UK and Abu Dhabi, the US artist reflects on the continued dominance of war as a theme in her work and says she longs for Trump to be “in the past tense” Jenny Holzer has put words in unexpected places for nearly 40 years. Her texts […]

Why Courbet’s The Origin of the World is so popular—and it’s not what you think

Our most-read story of 2016 was about Facebook’s legal battle over the French master’s work. Here’s why it still causes a stir, 100 years on. Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) a painting of a woman’s “lower groin” (bas-ventre), as the writer Edmond de Goncourt coyly described it in June 1889, is as […]

Why the ‘Uber effect’ is proving elusive for online platforms

Barely a month goes by without the launch of an online initiative that aims to disrupt the art market and bring the “Uber and Airbnb effect” to art transactions. But witness the crowds pacing the aisles at a big-league art fair, or spilling out of the salesrooms during the evening auctions, and the impact of […]

Wonders and blunders: what makes a great museum?

Artists, architects and curators tell us about the spaces they love—and hate. What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque […]

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye. Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead […]

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 […]

The false Gods of Dada: on Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki

A new book on the movement draws lessons on the dangers of eclecticism. In the final chapter of the art historian Maria Stavrinaki’s new book, Dada Presentism, she imagines the origin of Dada as an immaculate conception. “Who, in fact, did invent Dada?” she asks. “Everyone and no one.” Amidst the devastation of the First […]

The unspoken reason why galleries are flocking to Los Angeles

Galleries like Sprüth Magers and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel quietly but fiercely compete for the city’s artists. The grand openings of the Los Angeles branches of European galleries Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth (called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel), on 23 February and 13 March respectively, are sure to generate even more buzz about the […]

Sexy, spotless and sure: the three golden rules of desire

As far as a painting’s hammer price is concerned, other, less noble considerations matter a great deal more than the picture’s intrinsic quality. Determining the market value of a picture can be a surprisingly heartless experience. There before you stands a fine portrait by a great artist, whose energy and creative genius you see emblazoned […]

Elmgreen & Dragset create a fictional art fair in Beijing

The maverick Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset focus on an art world staple—art fairs and their enduring popularity—in their latest show, The Well Fair, which opens at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing on Sunday (24 January-17 April). The artists have transformed the main hall of UCCA into a fictional fair […]

Antony Gormley to confront Hong Kong’s raw nerves by placing sculptures on its rooftops

Just over a year ago, thousands of pro-democracy protesters took over Hong Kong’s busiest thoroughfares. This month, 31 life-sized naked bodies made by Antony Gormley fr om cast iron and fibreglass will infiltrate the skyline, overlooking some of the same streets. The arrival of the British artist’s Event Horizon, which is due to be unveiled […]

The great debate: why galleries could take even more money from their artists

This was the controversial suggestion of a recent survey. We asked its author and four art-world figures to comment. A Twitterstorm erupted in the US last month over the findings of survey of 8,000 art galleries based in the US, UK and Germany. Cultural researcher and Larry’s List co-founder Magnus Resch found (no surprise here […]

Australian gambling millionaire acquires acclaimed oil installation

Richard Wilson’s 20:50 work will leave the Saatchi Gallery in London, and head for David Walsh’s museum in Tasmania—but may go on a world tour first. The Australian collector David Walsh has bought the oil installation 20:50 by the UK sculptor Richard Wilson, one of the most talked about art interventions of the past 25 […]

Year of record sales, but at what cost to the art?

Unease grows as it gets harder for artists to resist servicing a booming market The art market appeared to be in rude health as 2014 drew to a close. More money was spent on blue-chip and emerging art last year than at any other point in history, and the trade has been in rapid expansion […]

Year in review: six things you need to know about the art market

2014 has been a year of increasing disruption in the art market. While its vastly increased value over the past ten years (€47.4bn in 2013 compared to €18.6bn in 2003, according to the latest Tefaf report by Clare McAndrew) has inevitably brought change, 2014 has seen those changes magnified and evolving in directions that were not […]

Performance: do you buy it?

The public is warming to the medium, but collectors remain cool. While some visitors spent the first public day of Art Basel admiring multi-million-dollar paintings, others strayed from the main fair to watch a nude woman examine her body with a hand mirror and a war veteran stand silently in a corner. These performance works, […]