Glenn O’Brien was among Jean-Michel Basquiat’s earliest advocates, recognizing the young artist’s immense talent before his work made the leap from grafitti to the walls of New York galleries. Basquiat executed Famous Negro Athletes on paper as a gift for O’Brien who would go on to become a close friend of the artist over the course of […]
The photographer’s once-taboo images have lost their power to shock, and feed into outworn stereotypes, a critic argues. Thirty years after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death, the legend still obscures the photographs. His demise at 42 from AIDS, during the height of the American epidemic, gave a tabloid stamp to the authenticity of his sexually transgressive art. And right […]
A re-creation of the auteur’s most personal show, madly grand and deadpan daft, essentializes a strange glamour that has leaked from the art world into culture at large. The most bizarre exhibition in town this summer bears on the prevalence, lately, of “curating” as an honorific for the organizing of practically anything by just about anyone. […]
Distraught over the death of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart, he repeated, “It could have been me.” “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim, is a small but timely and often surprising powerhouse of a historical show pegged to a not very good scrap of painting by a star-dusted name. The exhibition includes photographs, […]
Gallerists and art advisors suspect there could be ulterior motives to the industry leader’s latest power play, but Gagosian would beg to differ. When one of America’s most powerful art dealers makes plans for the future, people pay attention. But some critics suspect that Gagosian’s plan to enter the art advisory field will lead to […]
Vacuous, disposable and deathless. Exuberant, celebratory and perfect. There is little that has not been said about Jeff Koons’s seminal 1986 sculpture, which is offered in New York on 15 May In the 33 years since it was created, Jeff Koons’s Rabbit has become one of the most iconic works of 20th-century art. Standing at just over […]
We examine three trend lines from the recent slate of Hong Kong sales to determine where the market is headed. Like a massive Companion balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the mind-boggling $14.8 million paid for a KAWSpainting in Hong Kong earlier this month upstaged every other result from Sotheby’s recent series of sales in the city. But […]
In September 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts will present a solo exhibition of the internationally acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950), the most significant in the UK for over a decade. The exhibition will bring together both existing and specially conceived new works for the occasion, from drawings and sculptures to experiential environments, […]
Don’t be afraid to sell a masterpiece, look at the middle market, and more advice for cashing in on art when the stock market is falling. Nothing gold can stay, and every art-industry veteran understands that the good times don’t last forever. Beneath the big-money rumblings of last November’s New York auctions—a bellwether slate of […]
Money, morals and metrics In such stormy times, what does it mean for a museum to be successful? For this, our 101st issue of In Other Words, we asked directors around the world how they evaluate achievement. From balancing the books to broadening the conversation; from creating communities to provoking public debate, museums have complex […]
A few years ago, a plaza in Paris was named after the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born painter who became a global sensation in the early 1980s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. No similar honor has been bestowed upon Basquiat by the City of New York. However, the opening of the Brant Foundation Art […]
Seedy motels, fast food joints and the romantic underbelly of urban life are all synonymous with the warm artificial glow of neon. Since the 1920s, the commercialization of “liquid fire” has seen countless industries quite literally put their name up in lights, and although other more high-tech forms of illumination are now available, no other […]
An exhibition at the Brant Foundation’s New York space reveals how much he had in common with Jenny Holzer and Hans Haacke. Over the years, the biggest fans of Jean-Michel Basquiat have had a strange way of showing their affection: They’ve just about drowned him and his work in tired romantic clichés. He’s supposed to be a […]
The East Village edifice—a former power substation and studio of contemporary artist Walter De Maria—was renovated by architects Gluckman Tang “[Jean-Michel] Basquiat did most of his painting in a ten-block radius of here,” says the founder of the Brant Foundation, Peter Brant, gesturing out the large plate glass windows of the foundation’s new East Village […]
A gallery exhibition in Manhattan gives the truest picture of the artist, at 88, who is continuing to work and innovate. At 88, Jasper Johns is not slowing down. After spending more than six decades cultivating an extensive and influential body of work, he continues to be relentlessly productive and inventive. His art has sometimes been […]
Robert Ryman, one of the most important American artists to emerge after World War II, a Minimalist who achieved a startling non-Minimalist variety in his paintings even though they were mostly white and usually square, died on Friday at his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. He was 88. His death was announced on Saturday […]
In the wake of a torrential downpour in early January, a sizeable and slightly random group of artists, collectors and art-curious celebrities descended upon the L.A. Convention Center for an “opening night premiere party”—hosted by Mad Men star Jon Hamm—celebrating the 23rd edition of the L.A. Art Show. Inside this somewhat inscrutable international sprawl, stateside […]
A sweeping retrospective shows a personal side of the Pop master — his hopes, fears, faith — and reasserts his power for a new generation, Holland Cotter writes in his review. Mr. Paradox, who never left, is back. Although, technically, “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again”at the Whitney Museum of American Art […]
As Bruce Nauman’s touring retrospective opens at MoMA, Jonathan T.D. Neil interrogates why the American artist remains so relevant today. Why Nauman? For anyone familiar with Bruce Nauman and his wellestablished place in the history of contemporary art, the answer, ‘Because it’s Bruce Nauman’, will suffice. But what will follow, inevitably, are explanations that, since […]
“Disappearing Acts” lets us see with clarity where the artist stands and why he is pertinent to our wrenching moment. If art isn’t about life and death, and the emotions and ethics that surround them, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? Some artists focus on those, but the most interesting head for the uncool existential […]