German contemporary art a big draw as artists come to terms with past

Sotheby’s says ‘unprecedented interest’ with buyers tuning in to postwar masters’ attempts to use work to confront history. For years, contemporary art sales at the world’s leading auction houses were dominated by the works of American and British artists. When it came to eye-watering amounts of money, paintings by anglophone figures including Andy Warhol, Jackson […]

Inside Wolfgang Tillmans’s Superb Tate Modern Survey

The new show feels unquestionably relevant. The opening [today] of “2017,” Wolfgang Tillmans’s survey at Tate Modern, is bringing a much needed breath of fresh air to the London museum, and not because recent exhibitions might have been lackluster—on the contrary, the ongoing Robert Rauschenberg retrospective is a triumph, and the recent solos of Agnes […]

Wolfgang Tillmans review – a rollercoaster ride around the world

Room after room, turn after turn, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Tate Modern exhibition teems with images large and small. Images alone and arrays of larger and smaller photographs, framed and unframed and attached to the wall with bulldog clips, hung high over doorways and shuffled on a table. A young man’s neck, a knee, a hand stuffed […]

Hans-Ulrich Obrist tops list of art world’s most powerful

Artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, dubbed ‘curator who never sleeps’, wins ArtReview’s accolade for second time.  Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries dubbed as the “curator who never sleeps”, has topped this year’s ArtReview Power 100 of the most influential people in the art world. It is the second time Obrist […]

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 […]

Dear Seattle Art Fair, I Love You and I Want You to Live

Just like last year, when the announcement came over the loudspeaker at 6 p.m. on Sunday that the Seattle Art Fair was closed, people applauded. But this time, the applause was a little more sparse, a little more nervous. Fair organizer Max Fishko said people clap only in Seattle. The desire for success is so […]

8 New Classics of 21st-Century Photography You Need to Know Now

Since its inception in the early 1800s, photography has been the site of immense change as it evolved from a scientific challenge to a world-shaking mass medium over the past 200 years. The digital revolution of the new millennium has brought on both never-before-seen capabilities and a new ubiquity of the photographed image, developments artists […]

Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?

Art is a self-starting, entrepreneurial activity, and what is true of entrepreneurs in general is perhaps true of artists. “[T]he most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability….,” Quartz recently explained, debunking the cult of the entrepreneur as visionary risk-taker. “When […]

‘These Pictures would Not have been Possible Ten Years Ago”: Woflgang Tillmans on his New Show at David Zwirner Gallery

Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs begin with the German artist asking himself, “Can I do this?” Last week, at a preview of “PCR,” his new show at David Zwirner, in New York, Tillmans pointed out two new photographs of Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, as examples of that process. One of the images is a […]

Wolfgang Tillmans Opens Up on His Art, His Influences, and His Personal Tragedy

The German artist Wolfgang Tillmans came of age in the 1980s, long before the existence of digital photo-sharing platforms, but he has always seen photography as an inherently social medium (and one that’s as sensitive and fragile as human relationships). In this interview with artist, writer and Index magazine publisher Peter Halley, excerpted entirely from the […]

Manifesta 10 Succeeds Despite Controversy

Manifesta 10 opens at St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum this Saturday. To some—likely the roaming art biennale’s curator, Kasper König, among them—that sole fact is accomplishment enough. Since König signed on to head up the exhibition, much has changed on the ground in Russia: a swath of anti-gay legislation and censorship, and the Kremlin’s growing expansionist tendencies with the annexation […]

Isa Genzken at MoMA and the Schizoconsumerist Aesthetic

They love, love, love Isa Genzken over at the Museum of Modern Art, where the artist’s first major American museum survey remains on view through March 10, before traveling to museums in Chicago and Dallas. The 65-year-old Berlin-based German sculptor, whose 150 works fill 10 open-plan galleries on the museum’s sixth floor, is “one of the most important artists […]