Say no more …
It is what it was, and what it has become. Where would we be without it?
Author Archives: BAC
Georg Baselitz Action Portraits: A Reflection Of The Artist’s Unconscious
The Britannia Street Gagosian gallery is currently showing the works of Georg Baselitz in Farewell Bill. The new Baselitz paintings are self-portraits that pay reverence to the great artist Willem de Kooning. Baselitz encountered Kooning’s gestural paintings, Woman I and Woman II, as a student in Germany in 1958. A traditional portrait depicts a realistic […]
Dan Graham to Design Met Museum Rooftop Exhibit
The American Conceptualist Dan Graham has long worn many art world hats. He has produced films and videos, drawings and prints; chronicled rock culture; and collaborated with bands like Sonic Youth and Japanther. But Mr. Graham is perhaps best known for his architectural environments and glass pavilions, which he has been designing since the 1980s. […]
The works of Martin Creed: Genius or joke?
When Martin Creed was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001, it showed him something about himself that he’d rather not have seen. “What I hated was finding out how much I wanted to win,” he says. “Prizes are stupid but God, I was a desperate man!” It’s an uncharacteristic admission in some ways—Creed casts […]
Shopping for Art – Video
Browsing the International Art Market. From Tutankhamun to the ancient Greeks, the church to the Medicis, there’s a long history of shopping for art. Comedian Sally Phillips explains the bulk-buys and the beheadings – then explores the international art fair circuit to find out what’s worth its weight in gold … and why Tate bought […]
A Brief History of Art Undressed – Video
Television presenter and writer Dawn O’Porter takes us on a whistle-stop tour of nudity in art, from its origins 25,000 years ago to the present day With an unflinching gaze, O’Porter tackles the ever-changing rules of acceptability for representing and beholding flesh in art. Watch the Video!
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood” – Mr. Rogers
Snow Day!
What Does Photography Even Mean Anymore, Really?
What’s the connection between a looped high-def video of a carving knife, a row of tall, narrow convex black mirrors, and a hundred-foot-long scroll swarming with shimmering iridescent colors? They are all photographs according to no less an authority than the International Center of Photography (ICP), where they are featured in the exhibition “What Is a Photograph?” on view […]
A Mexican Showcase for Ambition
MEXICO CITY — Few devotees, domestic or foreign, seem to find their way to Mexico City’s museums of contemporary art, of which there are several. Nor are any of those museums firmly fixed on the route followed by the packs of art professionals — curators, collectors, dealers — who ritually travel the planet from one art […]
Today’s Billionaire Egomaniacs Have Turned the Art World Into a High-Stakes Poker Game — But the Loss Is Ours
I have been an invited interloper in the fiefdoms of the decimal-pointed rich long enough now to know that when rich men want to distinguish themselves from other rich men they buy art. Among practitioners of modern-day social one-upmanship this is hardly new. The nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age were the first Americans to […]
Martin Creed: What’s the Point of Broccoli at the Hayward Gallery?
A woman walks into a grocery store and asks the clerk for some broccoli. The clerk responds that they’re fresh out of broccoli, but the woman refuses to yield on her request. After a bit of back-and-forth, the exasperated clerk offers: Clerk: Ma’am, spell the “car” in carrot. Woman: C-A-R. C: Okay, now spell the […]
Is Futurism’s Time Now? The Guggenheim Takes a Chance On Turbulent History
Famously inspired by a car crash, Futurism burst forth in 1909 with an uncompromising agenda. Its poetics, as decreed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his manifesto, would be “courage, audacity and revolt” nurtured by “fire, hatred, and speed.” Museums had become “cemeteries,” Marinetti wrote, and should be demolished, along with libraries, to deliver Italy from the […]
Million dollar Ai Weiwei vase smashed – the (actual) Video
Million dollar Ai Weiwei vase smashed. Mr Ai Weiwei said he did not support artists destroying other artists’ work. An American artist has been arrested after smashing a million dollar vase painte. A vandal was arrested after breaking a million-dollar vase at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). According to the Miami Police report, a […]
Miami painter thought $1m Ai Weiwei vase was Home Depot-style pot
A Miami painter who destroyed a priceless Han dynasty vase in a “spontaneous protest” at the city’s new art museum claims he thought he was smashing a cheap garden pot. Maximo Caminero said he picked up the ancient urn from an exhibition curated by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum […]
Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by Protester at Miami Museum
MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.
Who’s the vandal: Ai Weiwei or the man who smashed his Han urn?
An attack on the Chinese artist’s installation in Miami has been condemned as an act of vandalism. Why is smashing art only acceptable if an acclaimed global artist does it? A “protest” at a Miami art museum raises some questions about what exactly art is, now.
Tall storeys: Daredevil photography
British adventure photographer Lucinda Grange has travelled the world, scaling famous buildings and structures and taking pictures from the top. Among her impressive list of climbs is the Great Pyramid of Giza, Firth of Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.
Public Art, Beneath a Bridge
The underside of the Granville Street Bridge in Vancouver will be turned into a surface for artworks in lightboxes as part of the Vancouver House project. The forgotten urban area under the bridge is being reclaimed as part of the development. Westbank Projects is planning to bracket the main section of the bridge with low-rise buildings and […]
Contemporary Keeps Climbing at Sotheby’s
London—The contemporary art market continued its steady climb at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, with a sale dominated by a strong grouping of paintings by international blue chip artists that brought in £87,915,500 ($144,550,665). Ten of the 57 lots offered went unsold, for a trim buy-in rate by lot of 17.5 percent and seven percent by value. Twenty […]
10 American paintings before Pollock
Did American painting exist before Abstract Expressionism? Not such a daft question if we don’t get to see any of it. Many will still argue that American painting before mid-century, with just a few exceptions, is really too derivative, too backward-looking to get excited about, and that it was photography that American artists really excelled […]