Burritos in the Gallery? How Post-Everything Sculpture Works Today

2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Marcel Duchamp walked into the Society of Independent Artists lugging a porcelain urinal he had purchased at 5th Avenue’s J. L. Mott Iron Works and submitted it as a “readymade” sculpture. Duchamp’s radical and audacious gesture was met, at the time, with shock and indignation—it was literally hidden away behind a screen during the […]

Why has looking at art in Britain become a snob’s rite of passage?

To have “taste” in art and know a bit about it is part of the battery of glib accomplishments that mark out the elite from ordinary folk. This hateful art snobbery has nothing to do with a true love of art – it is just about being able to talk the talk. The French sociologist Pierre […]

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 […]

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.

Petr Pavlensky: why I nailed my scrotum to Red Square

On a snowless but chilly afternoon early in the Moscow winter, a 29-year-old man with a gaunt, emaciated face stepped on to the vast expanse of Red Square. He made his way to a spot on the cobblestones not far from the marble mausoleum housing the waxy corpse of Vladimir Lenin, and began to undress. In […]

Parents of the Judd-Climbing Kid Speak

Remember the kid who climbed on the Donald Judd sculpture at the Tate Modern? Well, her parents have taken to the London Evening Standard to set the record straight. They want the world to know that their daughter, Sissi Belle, was only on the sculpture for a matter of seconds and meant no harm — and that the nine-year-old […]

Our nine-year-old was just being ‘anti-establishment’, say parents of girl who climbed on $10m Tate Modern sculpture

The fashion-designer parents of a young girl who shocked art-lovers by climbing on a multi-million pound sculpture at Tate Modern today said their nine-year-old daughter was simply being “anti-establishment.”  “It’s not right, but they were just interested. Their only crime was to be seduced by a ladder of jewel-coloured shelving. Sissi has always been anti-establishment […]

What NOT to Do with Kids in a Museum

Bushwick gallerist Stephanie Theodore is at the Tate Modern today and spotted this hilarious/sad/incredible/unbelievable (so many mixed emotions) scene of parents allowing their child to use a Donald Judd sculpture as a … er … a bunk bed.  In response to my question of whether she actually took this almost-hard-to-believe scene she responded: yes.  I told […]

How Artist Jon Kessler Invented the Web

For the past decade Jon Kessler, the artist and professor in Columbia University‘s Visual Arts program, has been using his character the Global Village Idiot as a way to explore themes of surveillance, interconnectivity, and the slippage between reality and fiction that is created by the forces of digital technology and the Internet. A visionary who appears […]

Bjarne Melgaard and Gavin Brown Say “Racist Chair” is Nothing Compared to Global Warming

While Dasha Zhukova was all apologies yesterday concerning what some observers have dubbed the “Racist Chair” fiasco—in which Russian socialite and arts patron Zhukova was pictured on Russian fashion website Buro 24/7 sitting atop a Bjarne Melgaard sculpture of a black woman trussed up to form the shape of a chair—Melgaard and his dealer, Gavin Brown, are taking a different tack. In […]

Why there’s nothing racist about the ‘racist chair’

Bjarne Melgaard’s black woman in the shape of a chair – as seen in the now-notorious photoshoot of Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Dasha Zhukova – has been totally misunderstood. The contemporary art world likes to think it has a common touch. While classical music is for the elite and the literary novel a minority taste, the […]

The Art World’s Most WTF Moments in 2013 – Slideshow

From Lady Gaga’s infiltration of the art world to George W. Bush’s foray into self portraiture and cat paintings, there have been quite a few moments this year to which the ARTINFO staff could only respond with a resounding “WTF?!” Click on the slideshow to see 10 of the most baffling, despicable, and ridiculous art […]

He’s back … honestly! Chinese camouflage artist returns …

They may look like plain old photographs of road sides and supermarkets, but these meticulous images take hours to construct.  It is the latest series of camouflage trickery unveiled by artist Liu Bolin, or ‘the invisible man’, who made his name blending into the background of everyday scenes.