According to the New York Times’ chief art critic Roberta Smith, she only gives one talk and she’s been giving it for the last 30 years. “I give it a new title every so often,” she quipped last week . Smith’s glibness may appear off-putting, but in person it was anything but. I interviewed her […]
In spite of countless false starts and snowy regressions, it is technically spring in New York now (really!), and it is therefore open season for public art. The city’s parks are quickly filling with public art as outdoor exhibitions open in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. From a reclining giant in Queens and a deconstructed duplicate […]
Money continues to pour into art, and with it, stories multiply about art’s manipulation by callow titans of finance. Speaking of the recent decade, one pundit said not so long ago: “The conversation has turned from ‘Is art an asset class?’ to ‘Art is an asset class,’ and then to ‘How do we take advantage […]
Museum-goers were treated to a shocking display at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery on Saturday when a visitor stripped naked before Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” As the naked man faced the Botticelli painting, he struck the same pose as the goddess depicted in the 15th-century work. He then scattered rose petals around himand took a knee in front of the famous […]
Art dealer Larry Gagosian pushes the best work – Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Wright, Urs Fischer – and fills the gap in our public galleries with real taste and belief.Is the Gagosian empire like the Starbucks of contemporary art? A megalomaniac attempt to corner the art market? It may seem so, but this chain store of […]
One great rock duo – the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince – explore the greatest duos in art. Featuring double-acts such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, they examine this most intense bond as part of the Tate Unlock Art series. Watch […]
Behind every great artist is a great curator. But what do they actually do? Serpentine superstar Hans Ulrich Obrist reveals the delights and dangers of his craft – while Yoko Ono, David Shrigley and more pick their all-time favourite show. Diaghilev and Cocteau tried to explain what they did with the words: “Etonnez moi!” Astonish […]
Photographer Nan Goldin burst on to the art scene in 1986 with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, hugely influential images that chronicled the druggy New York demi-monde she and her friends inhabited. Now 60, her latest work is all about children. So has the queen of hardcore photography finally mellowed?
By 1991, Mike Kelley had emerged as a crucial artist in Los Angeles, at the head of a pack that had pushed into prominence in the previous decade. His riveting sculptures reassembled from ratty stuffed animals, crocheted dolls and other tattered children’s playthings that he scavenged from thrift shops were also generating considerable critical attention […]
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]
‘Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,’ at the Brooklyn Museum. “A change is gonna come,” the soul singer Sam Cooke promised in his 1964 hit song. And so it did. Officially, it arrived fast, with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act that year. In reality, its progress was killingly slow, and […]
LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public […]
Disposable and deteriorated, the developer trays used by photographers are usually discarded. Brooklyn-based photographer and printer John Cyr has discovered the beauty in these battered trays, where so many images first appeared.
The late German artist Sigmar Polke was not the type to make things easy for anyone. After trying to interview him in Los Angeles in 1995, reporter Kristine McKenna wrote that she felt like Margaret Dumont “trying to get a straight answer out of the Marx Brothers.” That same year, British critic Adrian Searle showed up at Polke’s […]
In the weeks since Art Basel in Hong Kong announced that its 2015 edition would take place nearly two months earlier than in the past, various lines of speculation about the rationale behind the move have been buzzing. With the vast amount of advanced planning that goes into pulling off a major art fair, the packed schedules […]
Could it be? Are we already post-Internet? It’s a bemusing term you may have heard floating around the art world recently, and now a new exhibition called “Art Post-Internet” at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—organized by critic/curator Karen Archey with writer/gallerist Robin Peckham—has set out to encapsulate the budding movement, which may be the most significant of its kind […]
The season of art market performance reports is upon us, and keeping up with them all can be an all-consuming—and sometimes baffling—affair. In the last month various entities have declared 2013 to have been both the best year ever and the second best year ever for art sales, while also (erroneously) declaring art to be […]
From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around. Check it out.
LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]