Think Halloween Is Gruesome? Try Contemporary Art

In the spirit of Halloween, ARTINFO has compiled a list of nine gruesome contemporary art works that give us nightmares all year long. From David Lynch’s “Six Men Getting Sick” to Hermann Nitsch’s “Theater of Orgies and Mysteries,” we’ve covered all the bases as October 31 approaches. Read on for our full, illustrated list. By way of example, Piero […]

Paddle8, Online Auction House Aims to Give Big Houses a Run for Their Money

Think of an auction house, and centuries-old institutions like Sotheby’s and Christie’s probably spring to mind.  But a four-year-old start-up believes that it can become something of an online equivalent to those companies — and it has drawn big-name backers from the art world along the way. The venture, Paddle8, plans to announce on Wednesday […]

Can the Single-Venue Gallery Survive?

Notable dealers have chosen to end eponymous enterprises to join larger entities at a partnership level. Such was the case with Gérard Faggionato, who recently joined David Zwirner in London, and Valerie Carberry, who merged with Chicago’s Richard Gray last spring. Veteran contemporary art dealers Esther Schipper and Jorg Johnen are in the process of […]

Alberto Burri, a Man of Steel, and Burlap

Alberto Burri’s prescient paintings — in patched, burned and otherwise abused burlap, plastic or wood — form a lavish, beautiful and admirable, if sometimes monotonous retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. It presents an artist who is impressive less for the profundity of his work than for his consistency and his ideas, which remain very much […]

Cy Twombly makes me want to plan the art heist of the century

You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]

Ai Weiwei’s Tree Installation At The Royal Academy

“Ai’s trees are made from parts of dead trees that are brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Ai transports these to his studio in Beijing where they are made into trees. As he says, “it’s just like trying to imagine what the tree looked […]

Has the Market for ‘Zombie Formalists’ Evaporated?

“No one wants to be a market darling,” an art dealer once told me. It’s the art world equivalent of a one-hit wonder, where sudden stardom and outsize demand for a particularly hot artist creates intense pressure, and has the potential to create unsustainable spikes in his or her market and career. Notwithstanding the fact that the […]

The new reserve currency for the world’s rich is not actually currency

Here’s an interesting question: If the world’s economy is filling markets with a pervasive sense of uncertainty, why is the art market picking up steam for yet another season of what would appear to be massive sales?  For the very rich, art is a store of value—which is not a very new idea and one […]

Can art still shock in the age of the extreme selfie?Can art still shock in the age of the extreme selfie?

Marina Abramović had a gun put to her head. Joseph Beuys shared a gallery with a coyote. But with social media full of shocking images, is it worth today’s artists putting their lives at risk? In 1974, standing expressionless beside a table in a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović began her performance piece Rhythm 0. […]

Turner Prize Sacrifices Visual Punch For Conceptual Filler In Glasgow

What do chorale singers, a craftsman’s showroom, a posh cafe with fur coats thrown over chairs and a library reading room have in common? Yes you guessed it – it must be Turner Prize time again!  This year the latest nominees for this most prestigious British art prize have gone north to Scotland for the first […]

Artlyst Podcast: Tim Marlow And Adrian Locke Discuss Ai Weiwei At The RA

Artlyst recently attended the press view of the Royal Academy of Arts’ landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Where the chief curators of this outstanding show, Tim Marlow, and Adrian Locke were kind enough to give Artlyst – and a host of other journalists – a tour of Ai Weiwei’s impressive retrospective. […]

Artlyst Photo Special: Ai Weiwei At The Royal Academy Of Arts

The Royal Academy of Arts is currently presenting 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 is presenting the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition includes significant […]

Right Wing Politician Says Anish Kapoor ‘Has Declared War on France’

Anish Kapoor had no idea what he was getting into when he accepted the invitation to install artworks in the gardens of Versailles. On September 30, right wing politician Fabien Bouglé, a local councilman, published an article on the website of Nouvel Observateur in which he claims that the artist “has declared war on France” […]

Changing order of names is deliberate at Griffin Art Projects

The news release about Griffin Art Projects caught my attention not only because it was about a new gallery opening in Metro Vancouver. What I noticed was how one sentence was worded. Here’s what it said: “The inaugural exhibition has been drawn from the collections of Brigitte and Henning Freybe and Kathleen and Laing Brown . . […]

The New Vancouver Art Gallery: A Generous Building

When the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed their conceptual design for a new building earlier this week, it was evidently a far cry from their current neoclassical courthouse.  Gone are the ionic columns, ornate marble and porticos; instead, Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron has developed a soaring, wood-wrapped structure with boxy levels that recalls West Coast […]

Mapplethorpe Print at Center of Culture Wars Returns to Public Eye

Twenty-five years ago this month, a Cincinnati jury wrote an exclamation point into the story of the culture wars that were raging through art museums and academia. The jury acquitted that city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director of criminal obscenity charges for exhibiting a group of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, graphic sexual images that […]

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?: ‘ART BREAKERS’ and the Art World’s Reality TV Problem

The art advisor is a bit of a grab bag of roles—curator, interior designer, dealer, buyer. The line dividing these roles is ever hazier because the sole aim of nearly every art professional is to make a lot of money, and many of them do. Let’s think of advisors as opportunistic personal shoppers for the […]

2015 Turner Prize Show is Earnest and Experimental but Ultimately Anticlimactic

On Wednesday, the 2015 Turner Prize exhibition held its preview at Tramway, the Glasgow art institution that’s hosting the prize this year.Sarah Munro, the outgoing director of the venue, and Paul Pieroni, co-curator of the exhibition, welcomed the throngs of arts journalists that included the top national newspapers and leading art magazines. Expectations were high. The […]