From Anselm Kiefer’s rotting sunflowers to a rollicking super-show all over Scotland, via Rembrandt, Matisse, Andy Warhol and Egon Schiele … it was an eye-opening year. From the rusty submarines hanging in a vitrine in the courtyard to bookworks in which photographs and black paint created eerie provocative assemblages, Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective rocked me. In […]
Putting aside any petty concerns for bridges burned, here’s an incomplete list of the most despicable moments in 2014’s art world, as viewed by Scott Indrisek of Blouin Artinfo.com. From from candy factories to soggy concerts, there are two sides to every story, right?
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 […]
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 […]
This year hasn’t even come to an end. Yet, intrepid gallerists and collectors are no doubt already pulling out their calendars to mark out the fair circuit for the year 2015. To help weed out the best from the rest, artnet News’ European editors sorted through the stacks of notes and reports from the year’s fairs […]
To meet the needs of the season, a list follows below of some of the most popular stories that ran on the ARTnews website in 2014, ranging from artist profiles and investigative stories to on-the-ground art-fair coverage and breaking news. They are divided by month, and presented in no particular order. Lots here to read, to get ready for 2015.
While other art publications sing the praises of the rich and powerful, we like to look at those who are largely overlooked (or worse, exploited) in order to understand the real state of the art world and its discontents. So, here you have our annual assessment of those below the most powerful. And yes, we’ve finally unhitched […]
The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]
Caravaggio, Bruegel and Van Gogh all made studies of the poor in spite of rich patronage. Why aren’t more artists doing that now? Art has a long history of entertaining the rich. From ancient artisans who made gold drinking cups for kings, to the artists of today who sell installations to plutocrats, art has been a […]
The sculptor Anish Kapoor, no stranger to grandeur, has been awarded a one-man show at the Château de Versailles, reports the New York Times. The show, running from June through October 2015, will follow similar shows in the same space by Takashi Murakami, Joana Vasconcelos, and Jeff Koons. According to Catherine Pégard, director of the Château […]
PARIS –The sculptor Anish Kapoor will be the next contemporary artist to be given a one-man show at the Château de Versailles. Mr. Kapoor’s show will run from June to October next year, the palace’s chief administrator, Catherine Pégard, said in an interview. “It’s not easy to choose an artist for Versailles,” Ms. Pégard said. “It’s not […]
Fairtigue A term circulating since 2012 and increasingly heard this year as dealers, collectors (and, yes, journalists) struggled to keep abreast of the exploding number of art fairs around the world. 6 more in the article …
Best art gallery: Museo Jumex by David Chipperfield Architects Built to house the private contemporary art collection of Colección Jumex, owner of Mexico’s leading juice company, David Chipperfield’s three-storey-tall gem of a building is a paragon of travertine-clad understatement. The most distinguishing feature of the relatively small, 2,500-square-metre building is a row of sawtooth peaks that give it the look […]
When sightings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Miley Cyrus (dressed as deranged vagabonds) at Art Basel in Miami cause a stir, one wonders what remains of the art world. Indeed it is tempting to think that the art world has been swallowed by the combined marketing and publicity machines of Hollywood and the fashion and music industries. Art is an […]
There are some questions in the art world that are not well received. Most of these have to do with money and rank. Asking how much an artwork costs or how important it is can seem a little crass and demeaning to the intensely personal experience of viewing high art. “The greatest picture in the […]
Art Basel Miami Beach is an ostentatious display of wealth and the wealthy. That this obvious fact is annually broached with dismay and shock by much of the art world is in no small part due to Art Basel itself, which, increasingly, insists on being similar in style to a biennial or large-scale exhibition, with […]
Anyone in need of a potent antidote to the feeding frenzy at Art Basel Miami Beach last week should head right now to Paula Cooper Gallery’s second-floor space at 521 West 21st Street in West Chelsea. On view there is a solo show by the German–born, New York–based artist Hans Haacke, whose six-decade career is […]
For weeks I’d been telling myself, and anyone who would listen, that I was going to skip the 2014 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. It had been a busy fall. October’s Frieze London fair is at least on my home turf, but then there were whirlwind trips to Paris, for FIAC, and New York, for […]
As we close out our coverage of Art Basel, a small recommendation for next year’s fairs: Get the hell out of Miami. It may look nice, but not even those with helicopters can avoid the traffic jams, there are never enough cabs and the food and hotel costs are astronomical. People, this is bullshit. Time for […]
“If no one ever looked at art, would anybody even create it? And how much does art actually need buyers.” Extremely reasonable questions put forth by the 2014 BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors, these queries appeared especially intriguing during the latest iteration of Art Basel in Miami Beach (ABMB). A positively gilded affair that […]