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 […]
Ai Weiwei’s crabs, Lawrence Weiner’s texts, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s smashed mirrors and Jenny Holzer’s redacted military documents have all given the baroque pile of Blenheim Palace – home to the dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill – a jolt over the past few years. Inviting living artists to insinuate their works into this world heritage site, […]
HAARLEM, the Netherlands — Frans Hals, a Dutch Golden Age portraitist of wealthy merchants and jolly rogues, was popular and successful in his lifetime, but before he died, he fell out of fashion. His loose, bold brush strokes were too rough for the 18th century. But the Impressionists rediscovered him in the 19th century, and […]
Two of Canada’s greatest designers have made a brilliant new building. Why aren’t they eager to tell you about it? “Underneath, it’s very quiet and dour,” says John Patkau. “But when the light hits it a certain way, it shimmers.” Mr. Patkau and his wife and fellow architect, Patricia, are walking around their latest project, […]
“I think much more than ‘Cloud Gate,’ ‘Cloud Column’ is meant specifically to capture the heavens and bring them down to earth” . The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) unveiled a new outdoor sculpture on Monday, a monumental reflective piece by Anish Kapoor that immediately brings to mind his iconic “Cloud Gate” in Chicago, more widely known as […]
Last week I was a guest at the magnificent Houghton Hall, one of the most impressive Palladian houses in Britain. This is a house steeped in history and surprisingly still in the hands of the original descendants of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Britain. Houghton Hall with its lavish interior design and […]
LACMA Reimagined: Vera Lutter’s Transformative Photographs. Check out the Video.
The focus of the exhibition is on Baselitz as an artist who is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting, and who is seen as the originator of an outstandingly inventive pictorial language. The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its first exhibition in 2018 to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor Georg Baselitz […]
Magid will receive $50,000 cash and a residency at Calder’s former home and studio in Connecticut. The Calder Foundation announced today that the New York-based artist Jill Magid has won the 2017 Calder Prize. The award comes with $50,000 cash and the promise to place one of the artist’s works in a major public collection. […]
Sam Keller says that Switzerland’s most-visited art museum will show more female artists as it expands on its 20th anniversary. In just over 20 years, the Fondation Beyeler has become Switzerland’s most-visited art gallery. And it is growing, in both ambition and size. The Beyeler’s director, Sam Keller, is overseeing the forthcoming $100 million Peter Zumthor-designed expansion, which […]
Sections of an all-American home have been mounted on the walls. A major new public art work by Rachel Whiteread modelled on a suburban US house will be unveiled next week at the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, south London. The wall sculpture, titled US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015), will greet embassy visitors as […]
On April 27th, more than a hundred people gathered in the underground auditorium of a prestigious contemporary-art museum in Mexico City. Those who couldn’t find seats lingered outside, watching a live video feed of what was transpiring within; more than seventy thousand others streamed the proceedings at home. For almost two hours, the audience looked on […]
Exhibition of Colour Space paintings will open in March in the gilded state rooms of Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Damien Hirst is to take over the spectacular gilded state rooms of Britain’s finest Palladian mansion to show a new series of his long-running spot paintings. The Colour Space works, two of which can be seen here […]
The British artist Damien Hirst will exhibit new works from his series of spot paintings at a stately home in Britain. The exhibition, titled “Colour Space,” will open in March at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, in the southeast of England; the mansion was built in the 1720s for Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Roughly 50 of […]
Is Donald Trump a conceptual artist? That’s the intriguing possibility put forth in an online petition Tuesday that seeks to have the group of eight prototypes for Mr. Trump’s controversial Mexican border wall designated a national monument. The prototypes were built at a cost of $3.3 million in federal funds and unveiled last October along the United […]
If you had Ben Heller’s eye, you’d have picked 50 straight Derby winners, or signed 100 future Hall of Fame ballplayers when they were 17. “When I think of my old apartment on the Upper West Side,” says the tall, spry Heller, who is 91, “even I’m shocked.” In the mid-1950s, the talent he was […]
As three new commissions open this year in the UK and Abu Dhabi, the US artist reflects on the continued dominance of war as a theme in her work and says she longs for Trump to be “in the past tense” Jenny Holzer has put words in unexpected places for nearly 40 years. Her texts […]
Sinks, baths, stairs, hot-water bottles, beehives and the space beneath chairs … a walk through Rachel Whiteread’s casts is a journey into a common landscape made strange Some of her more recent casts of cabins and sheds have been permanently located in out-of-the way places, to be discovered by chance (just imagining them baking in […]
One of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, Whiteread uses industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space. Her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental. Born in London in 1963, Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. The same year she made House 1993–1994, a […]
The eminent artist has placed a cast of a shed on New York’s Governors Island, evoking both Thoreau and Trump – a blow for art that takes the viewer by stealth. America is a country of imagination and big dreams, some inspired, some twisted. It is the land of liberty, the open and optimistic birthplace […]