Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Billed as a homecoming, the first Edinburgh retrospective for the painter Peter Doig lingers in the imagination, says Alastair Sooke. With the exception of Gauguin, the French stockbroker who plunged into Tahiti with whom Doig is frequently compared, there are few artists it makes less sense to consider through the filter of their national identity. […]

Confessions of a Gallery Girl Pt. 7: Vices Of The Met Gala

New York’s annual Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art may serve to celebrate the Costume Institute’s newest exhibitions but, from experience, it is also an event of debauchery! I feel like the Met Gala’s punk theme was dreamed up by a drunk intern who knew she was getting fired anyway so why not?

Peter Doig: a taste for the tropics

Forget pickled sheep and unmade beds – Peter Doig’s new show will turn the Scottish National Gallery into a temple of painterly delights. The pleasure principle struggles for recognition these days as a measure of art appreciation. The pleasure of paint in particular, with life-drawing as its grammar, has been brushed aside with gestures heavy in conceptual irony. There […]

When Duchamp came to Kent

Alastair Sooke looks back on the riddling Frenchman’s important, but little-known, summer holiday in Herne Bay exactly 100 years ago. No modern artist was as riddling and enigmatic as the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp. Born in 1887, he spent his life upending expectations about what art could be. Even his most diehard disciples were confounded by his decision in 1923 […]

JAY Z “Picasso Baby: A ‘Performance’ Art Film”

This was certainly a “performance”, but we are not sure if it was an “art performance”. Perhaps after viewing the Jay-Z video (or as much of the 10+ minutes you can get through), you might want to check out the BAC Link to the Vulture review by respected critic, Jerry Saltz, who often offers a thoughtful […]

Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77

Walter De Maria, a reclusive American sculptor whose multifaceted achievement and sly Dadaist humor helped give rise to earthworks, Conceptual Art and Minimal art, on an often monumental scale, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo […]

Small Time: Revisiting Jeff Koons vs. Paul McCarthy

Is bigger art always better art? Certainly in the age of Instagram, anything monumental is hard to discredit; people are easily impressed and love to obsess over questions like “How did it get here, how was it made and how much does it cost?” Somehow they forget the basic questions: “What is it and why is it?”