North Shore art collectors open new gallery

Brigitte and Henning Freybe will show work that might not be shown otherwise. A new public art gallery opening Saturday in North Vancouver is dedicated to showing the work of private collectors. It’s called Griffin Art Projects and is an initiative of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, two of Metro Vancouver’s major art collectors. The opening […]

Auction Houses Jockey to Lead Sales in First Big Market Test

Art auctions used to be a gentlemen’s business. Now the gloves are off. As art sales face their first major test since the August financial market rout, auction houses are jockeying not only for trophy artworks but also for the best positions to highlight them at the November auctions in New York. The result is […]

Anish Kapoor on Vandalism, Instagram, his Moscow Retrospective, and more …

ARTnews: During the walkthrough of the exhibition just now, you pointed to the “S-Curve” sculpture and said that, ‘In the age of Instagram, this is a selfie object.’ Now that you are on Instagram, have you enjoyed seeing the interaction between the art and viewer evolve? Anish Kapoor: I do see that. People look with […]

Anish Kapoor Forced by French Court to Remove Anti-Semitic Vandalism from Versailles Sculpture

Anish Kapoor returns to Versailles tomorrow, September 22, to commence his artistic intervention on the sculpture Dirty Corner, which has been vandalized three times since its installation in the gradens of Versailles in June. But the artist, who initially announced that he would leave the massive steel artwork untouched after it had been smeared with anti-semitic […]

They’re Watching us in Museums: Travor Paglen’s Show at Metro Pictures Takes on Surveillance

Last Thursday afternoon, I received an email from the artist Trevor Paglen. I’ll respect his privacy and not reveal the contents of the message, or the Gmail account he uses, but I’ll tell you about his sign-off. Instead of the standard message, “Sent from my iPhone,” or some cute variation on that along the lines […]

‘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 […]

How to Keep Your Artists Happy: A User’s Guide for Dealers

It’s hard to keep young up-and-coming artists happy, especially if they come with the nickname “generation me.” Whether it’s due to restlessness or a better opportunity, gallery representation can resemble a game of musical chairs. Remember when Julian Schnabel left Mary Boone, who gave him his first show in 1979, for Pace in the 1980s? In another boom […]

The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises

The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]

Royal Academician Ai Weiwei Opens Landmark Survey At Royal Academy Of Arts

The Royal Academy of Arts will present a landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Although Ai is one of China’s leading contemporary artists, his work has not been seen extensively in Britain and the Royal Academy will present the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition will include significant […]

Ai Weiwei review – momentous and moving

If there were any who doubted Ai Weiwei’s work matched his reputation, this rollercoaster of a show – racing between his time in jail, the Sichuan earthquake and 3,000 crabs – should silence them. Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. […]

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 […]

Ai Weiwei review – momentous and moving

Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. Porcelain sunflower seeds are one thing, crabs another. Good thing they’re not quite real. This is but one small moment in the largest show Ai Weiwei has held in Britain. Not exactly a retrospective, […]

The road to Ai Weiwei

Having settled in at the RA, Marlow is about to launch his first major exhibition: the work of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist who was imprisoned without charge in 2011 and released on condition that he should give up his passport. A thorn in the Chinese government’s side for two decades, he has made […]

Ovation’s Reality Show on Art Advisors Looks Horrible (but we’re going to be watching…)

Get ready for Art Breaker$, Ovation’s new reality television show, focusing on two New York art advisors. Miller Gaffney and Carol Lee Brosseau are making a pretty hard sell in a promo video, in which they introduce themselves and together proclaim, “We’re the top art advisors in the country!” “We travel the world in search […]

Review: Picasso, Completely Himself in 3 Dimensions

Many exhibitions are good, some are great and a very few are tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom. The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is in the third category. Large, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It sustains […]

10 Gallery Shows You Need to Pay Attention to This Fall

There have been persistent murmurs in the art world about the imminent (market) demise of the so-called Zombie Formalism movement, a kind of colorful, undemanding type of abstract painting that’s commanded astronomical prices for the past few years. Dire predictions and a few disappointing auction results aside, the evidence is hardly overwhelming. And yet, looking ahead to the fall’s most […]

Can an Artist Take on the Government (and Win)? A Q&A With Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen has tracked secret spy satellites, photographed so-called “black sites” like Area 51, cataloged hundreds of classified codes for military operations and their associated (and often bizarre) patches, and blasted images into space for the benefit of future civilizations or a visiting alien species. With a Ph.D. in experimental geography (it’s more than just […]

Intensity is the Best Politics: Hermann Nitsch in New York

From his earliest performances and actions in the 1960s involving animal remains through his infamous multi-day, multimedia festivals staged at an Austrian castle, Hermann Nitsch has remained a figure of boldness and controversy. Earlier this year a major show at Museo Jumex in Mexico City wascancelled — but no such fate has befallen the artist’s […]

Anish Kapoor must reconsider – Dirty Corner should be cleaned

Public art often gets scarred by battles over its meaning or right to exist, but the vandals who daubed antisemitic graffiti on his sculpture are idiots who picked the wrong target. Anish Kapoor, it turns out, is not only a brilliant artist but a brave one. Faced with an antisemitic attack on his open-air sculpture […]