Anish Kapoor must reconsider – Dirty Corner should be cleaned

Public art often gets scarred by battles over its meaning or right to exist, but the vandals who daubed antisemitic graffiti on his sculpture are idiots who picked the wrong target. Anish Kapoor, it turns out, is not only a brilliant artist but a brave one. Faced with an antisemitic attack on his open-air sculpture […]

See These Awe-Inspiring James Turrell Works Around Europe You Probably Didn’t Know Existed

James Turrell’s work is as instantly recognizable as it is undefinable, existing somewhere between land art, light art, sculpture, and installation. Turrell has been exploring the nature of light and space since the 1960s, and in that time has created works all over the world from Yucatan to Japan, not to mention his yet-unfinished opus […]

Daniel Buren on his Career, Luxury Collaborations, And Why he “Hated” the Venice Biennale

At 77 years old, Daniel Buren has lost none of his disruptive streak and continues to talk frankly.  Throughout his career, Buren has challenged the viewer’s concept of space with his in-situ works. In 1971, in the Guggenheim Museum, he controversially installed a 66 x 32 ft. canvas banner with his signature vertical stripes, which […]

The Broad’s Big Debut

LOS ANGELES – Eli Broad is a man with a reputation for getting things done. After building two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up, he transferred his drive to philanthropy about fifteen years ago; his achievements have since included almost single-handedly creating a cultural centre for downtown Los Angeles, including its monumental anchor – the Frank […]

Theaster Gate’s Ambitious New Chicago Arts Centre

In October 2012, Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates bought a 70,000-square-foot building from the City of Chicago. Constructed in 1923, the building was previously Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank, located between Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore neighborhoods. The city was ready to demolish it; Gates couldn’t let it go. The cost for this fixer-upper, […]

100 Antony Gormley Bodies Take Over Fort in Florence

Brunelleschi’s Dome, the architectural marvel that is in Florence’s Piazza del Duomo, may be one of the most breathtaking sights you’ll ever encounter. Staging an art exhibition that can successfully compete with a view of that iconic building is a tall order, but Antony Gormley‘s current show, “Human” is up to the challenge. Perched on a hill overlooking […]

Australian gambling millionaire acquires acclaimed oil installation

Richard Wilson’s 20:50 work will leave the Saatchi Gallery in London, and head for David Walsh’s museum in Tasmania—but may go on a world tour first. The Australian collector David Walsh has bought the oil installation 20:50 by the UK sculptor Richard Wilson, one of the most talked about art interventions of the past 25 […]

Philippe Parreno’s Hypnotism at the Park Avenue Armory

“The architecture becomes semi-conscious,” said Philippe Parreno during a morning press conference debuting his new installation for the Park Avenue Armory, which opens today and is on view through August 2. I believe he followed up this building-coming-alive statement with a comparison to the work of Philip K. Dick — the artist’s thick French accent […]

Kapoor’s vagina isn’t shocking. French art has always been a hotbed of amour

French conservatives are outraged over Anish Kapoor’s work in Versailles. But he’s not the first artist to bring sex into the country’s establishment. Anish Kapoor is putting the vagina in Versailles. Why on earth are the French so shocked? What has happened to the nation that gave us Courbet’s explicit painting The Origin of the […]

Glass tea house Mondrian pavilion by Hiroshi Sugimoto opens in 56th Venice Biennale

Situated on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, the ‘glass tea house mondrian’ by japanese artist hiroshi sugimoto unites wood, glass and water as a pavilion, holding the traditional japanese tea ceremony within its transparent walls. the temporary structure, presented at the venice architecture biennale 2014 as part of the activities of le stanze […]

10 Reasons To Be Excited About The New Whitney Museum

The new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in all its 28,000 tons of glory (as architect Renzo Piano pointed out during the preview Thursday), opens to the public May 1 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (see Does the New Whitney Museum Herald a Golden Age for New York Institutions?). artnet News joined the preview, […]

The Whitney Opens with a winner

Let’s cut to the chase: the Whitney Museum of American Art’s inaugural show in its new home in the Meatpacking District, “America Is Hard to See,” is outstanding. With about 600 works by a little over 400 artists, it offers a history of American art—and America—that is richly textured and that teems with beloved classics […]

NYT Review: New Whitney Museum’s First Show, ‘America Is Hard to See’

From outside, Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum of American Art, set beside the Hudson River, has the bulk of an oil tanker’s hull. Inside is entirely different. The galleries, with high ceilings, tall windows and soft pine-plank floors, are as airy and light-flooded as the 19th-century sailmaker’s lofts known to Herman Melville, who worked as […]

Does the New Whitney Museum Herald a Golden Age for New York Institutions?

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Meatpacking District museum, opening May 1, is fiercely awaited. In its new building, designed by Renzo Piano, the galleries and sculpture gardens will nearly double the museum’s previous exhibition space, with two floors devoted to showing off its collection. The museum expects to take in spillover from the millions of yearly […]

2014 in Review: Top 10 Big (Architecture) Projects

Best art gallery: Museo Jumex by David Chipperfield Architects Built to house the private contemporary art collection of Colección Jumex, owner of Mexico’s leading juice company, David Chipperfield’s three-storey-tall gem of a building is a paragon of travertine-clad understatement. The most distinguishing feature of the relatively small, 2,500-square-metre building is a row of sawtooth peaks that give it the look […]

Phillips Opens Massive New Flagship in London

Phillips announced the opening of a new auction house and exhibition space in the exclusive address of Berkeley Square, London, on Monday. The official opening will take place during October’s buzzing Frieze Art Fair week. The relocation is part of an ambitious plan to propel Phillip beyond its long-standing third-place position in the auctioneering game (“Ostrowski […]

Six radically converted historical buildings

Not all great architecture begins with a bulldozer. From Foster + Partners’ reworking of Berlin’s Reichstag, to last year’s Stirling Prize winner, the partially ruined Astley Castle by Witherford Watson Mann, many of the most successful new buildings start with an older one. The latest feature on the Phaidon Atlas brings together six of the most […]

Ai Weiwei prepares for Blenheim Palace show but must keep his distance

The artist Ai Weiwei, confined to his house and studio in Beijing, his passport confiscated by the state, has been roaming the corridors and state rooms of Blenheim Palace, one of the grandest houses in England, through a 3D computer model. He has never set foot in the gigantic home of the Duke of Marlborough, but is […]

‘Chelsea’s Not Going Anywhere’: Alex Logsdail Talks Lisson’s Upcoming New York Gallery

There may not be many Americans at Art Basel compared to the droves of Europeans, but this morning, the buzz here briefly centered around New York City when Lisson Galleryannounced plans to open a brand spanking new 8,500-square-foot space in Chelsea, constructed under and around the High Line. Nearly 50 years after Nicholas Logsdail opened Lisson’s […]