Douglas Coupland has been collecting the stuff for years: toy guns, adding machines, little astronaut figures, tiny cribs and toilets, a giant molar, a punching bag. They came from Craigslist, dumpsters, garage sales, eBay. Now gathered in an enormous installation – white items on white shelves; colourful trinkets on black shelves; a precarious Tower of […]
Forget the bloody martyrdoms and hot pincers … Viola’s glorious new video installation is a hi-tech Caravaggio that redefines religious art. Bill Viola has created a powerful modern altarpiece for St Paul’s Cathedral that perfectly suits the restrained spirituality of this most English of churches. Coming into Christopher Wren’s great building on a weekday morning when crowded buses […]
WAKEFIELD.- Yorkshire Sculpture Park announces an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, opening in the Park’s newly refurbished 18th century chapel following a £500,000 restoration. The project, the first by Ai Weiwei in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010, is accompanied by poetry readings from the works of celebrated poet Ai […]
Two exhibitions of new work by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei have opened in the UK. The first at a public art gallery in Yorkshire (Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is his first in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010. iron tree, 2013 is a majestic six-metre high sculpture […]
Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a strange new tree. Solid yet graceful, inspired by the street vendors of Jingdezhen in southern China, who sell wood for its beauty, “Iron Tree” (2013) is a collection of fragments held together with bolts. It seems to have been in the wars, this tree, much like its maker Ai Weiwei. […]
How do Dubai, Istanbul, or Hong Kong differ from the “traditional” hubs of London and New York? How can artistic activity and its economic corollaries be encouraged? Such were the questions put to a panel chaired by the indefatigable art market expert Georgina Adam at Christie’s London on May 27. Art Dubai director Savita Apte, art critic […]
The row around Marina Abramović is redundant, as the story of art is one of homages and remakes. But that’s not to say there isn’t a problem. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there […]
“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” proclaimed Marcel Duchamp, Dada master and the man behind everyone’s favorite urinal. The phrase only begins to explain the versatile, zany and ever-evolving works of the French-American artist, famously known for “The Fountain,” his 1917 pièce de résistance that will go […]
A group of curators and art historians have argued that the Serbian artist’s latest performance piece, due to open at London’s Serpentine Gallery on 11 June, fails to acknowledge the influence of another artist’s earlier work. A prestigious group of curators and art historians have written to the gallery questioning why Abramović’s latest performance piece […]
The Shard has spawned a host of angular glassy lumps across the capital. But is this new crystal city full of Shardettes a welcome change? When Renzo Piano casually described his design for London Bridge Tower in a press conference as “a shard … a shard of crystal,” he must have had little idea what […]
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 […]
The furore around the work, complete with vodka bottles and pregnancy tests, helped to give lift-off to Emin’s career. Few pieces of art have divided opinion quite like My Bed – in whichTracey Emin claimed to have spent a week after a bad break-up. Complete with vodka bottles, cigarette butts and pregnancy tests, the installation didn’t […]
There are two shows currently taking place in New York that regard Obama as a touchstone. The first is Michelle Grabner’s festive floor at the Whitney Biennial, where the president stares with distinguished self-possession into the lens of photographer Daywoud Bey. Young and commanding, this is Obama before the announcement of his candidacy in 2008. The moment marks a progressive […]
Ai Weiwei’s activism and his 2011 detention by the Chinese state have made him one of the world’s best-known artists but can you picture his work? Google him, and his portrait, not his art, dominates the images that appear. This is a useful reminder that he’s a top conceptual artist, with a knack for finding […]
Is there anything left to say about Richard Prince‘s notorious “Canal Zone” paintings and their attendant legal controversy? The case was finally settled, leaving its effect on copyright law uncertain. Art-world scolds who railed against Prince’s appropriation of photographer Patrick Cariou’s Rastafarian images have moved onto new causes. The dozen or so pictures, looking as if some of them might be […]
For a cynic, the biggest takeaway from Duchamp’s legacy might be that, since his death in 1968, no artist has done anything new. Which would, in part, be true: Duchamp’s impact on art could be compared to Einstein‘s on physics, with all ongoing developments simply elaborations of his foundational principles. But that aside, for the artists […]
From the suggestive to the precarious, a new exhibition casts the humble chair in a new light, writes Louisa Buck. Q: When is a chair more than just a chair? A: When it is an artist’s chair. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that sculpture can be experienced as much by the body as in […]
Due to an incoming and highly anticipated art exhibit, Alcatraz prison may be harder to get into than out of this fall. Sure, seats are always hard to get on the Alcatraz Cruises ferry, despite the 17 departures a day from Pier 33 in San Francisco. But empty seats may become an even scarcer commodity come Sept. […]
BAC is off to Frieze NY for the 3rd instalment of this excellent Fair (hopefully it will be a little less, ah, dramatic, this time…). Lots of other things are happening in New York at the same time, including the “satellite” Art Fairs: NADA, PULSE, and even “outsiders” are invited, to the Outsider Art Fair. […]
Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective. Watch the video.