From Anselm Kiefer’s rotting sunflowers to a rollicking super-show all over Scotland, via Rembrandt, Matisse, Andy Warhol and Egon Schiele … it was an eye-opening year. From the rusty submarines hanging in a vitrine in the courtyard to bookworks in which photographs and black paint created eerie provocative assemblages, Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective rocked me. In […]
Unease grows as it gets harder for artists to resist servicing a booming market The art market appeared to be in rude health as 2014 drew to a close. More money was spent on blue-chip and emerging art last year than at any other point in history, and the trade has been in rapid expansion […]
2014 has been a year of increasing disruption in the art market. While its vastly increased value over the past ten years (€47.4bn in 2013 compared to €18.6bn in 2003, according to the latest Tefaf report by Clare McAndrew) has inevitably brought change, 2014 has seen those changes magnified and evolving in directions that were not […]
To meet the needs of the season, a list follows below of some of the most popular stories that ran on the ARTnews website in 2014, ranging from artist profiles and investigative stories to on-the-ground art-fair coverage and breaking news. They are divided by month, and presented in no particular order. Lots here to read, to get ready for 2015.
The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]
Caravaggio, Bruegel and Van Gogh all made studies of the poor in spite of rich patronage. Why aren’t more artists doing that now? Art has a long history of entertaining the rich. From ancient artisans who made gold drinking cups for kings, to the artists of today who sell installations to plutocrats, art has been a […]
The sculptor Anish Kapoor, no stranger to grandeur, has been awarded a one-man show at the Château de Versailles, reports the New York Times. The show, running from June through October 2015, will follow similar shows in the same space by Takashi Murakami, Joana Vasconcelos, and Jeff Koons. According to Catherine Pégard, director of the Château […]
PARIS –The sculptor Anish Kapoor will be the next contemporary artist to be given a one-man show at the Château de Versailles. Mr. Kapoor’s show will run from June to October next year, the palace’s chief administrator, Catherine Pégard, said in an interview. “It’s not easy to choose an artist for Versailles,” Ms. Pégard said. “It’s not […]
Fairtigue A term circulating since 2012 and increasingly heard this year as dealers, collectors (and, yes, journalists) struggled to keep abreast of the exploding number of art fairs around the world. 6 more in the article …
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 […]
There are some questions in the art world that are not well received. Most of these have to do with money and rank. Asking how much an artwork costs or how important it is can seem a little crass and demeaning to the intensely personal experience of viewing high art. “The greatest picture in the […]
Art Basel Miami Beach is an ostentatious display of wealth and the wealthy. That this obvious fact is annually broached with dismay and shock by much of the art world is in no small part due to Art Basel itself, which, increasingly, insists on being similar in style to a biennial or large-scale exhibition, with […]
Anyone in need of a potent antidote to the feeding frenzy at Art Basel Miami Beach last week should head right now to Paula Cooper Gallery’s second-floor space at 521 West 21st Street in West Chelsea. On view there is a solo show by the German–born, New York–based artist Hans Haacke, whose six-decade career is […]
For weeks I’d been telling myself, and anyone who would listen, that I was going to skip the 2014 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. It had been a busy fall. October’s Frieze London fair is at least on my home turf, but then there were whirlwind trips to Paris, for FIAC, and New York, for […]
ON WEDNESDAY, a man with a plan was talking into a banana, walking down Lincoln Road. Two wives, fidgeting with rings and bracelets, prepared to step into a large inflatable concept—TRUTH—while the husbands stood a few paces back. At a bar made of sand, a woman wearing a pure white silicone alligator, clipped like a […]
Cubism is famous for its difficulty, and the fact that in the early years of its development, Picasso and Braque treated it as a secret, denying its existence to outsiders. It’s very brown, it’s visually severe, it’s hard to enter. What, exactly, was Cubism? I think Cubism has been seen as an intellectual art form […]
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation before Kiefer’s major retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, with the new Director of the RA, Tim Marlow. This is only the third time that one artist has taken over the whole of the Royal Academy, the other two being David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – we can’t wait to […]
Irving Sandler is an artists’ art historian. In contrast to other prominent midcentury art critics—like the New York Times’s John Canaday, who warned him against fraternizing with artists for fear of impairing his critical distance—Sandler purposefully immersed himself in his subjects’ milieu, first in his days as a young reviewer for Artnews and later as […]
This year’s Turner Prize shortlisted artists are hooked on materiality. Not some slick, seamless production-value fetishism geared for maximum visible impact, but almost the exact opposite—a thoughtful, often overly self-conscious, politically inflected take on materials and media, on production and reproduction, in which the frictionless transparency of images is jammed by the clunky inertia of […]
To say that Blenheim Palace is grand is an understatement: It’s epic. Entering the estate, with its stunning view of the open fields and humongous 18th-century mansion looming at the back, one feels like they have slipped into the opening credits of cult TV drama Downton Abbey. The Palace, built in 1704 by architect Sir […]