Vladimir Putin is telling artists and filmmakers to wash their mouths out with soap—or pay the price. A law that went into effect on Tuesday mandates that creatives whose work includes obscene language pay finesup to 2,500 rubles ($72) for individuals and up to 50,000 rubles ($1,460) for businesses, according to the AFP. Jeez, there goes a lot […]
The public is warming to the medium, but collectors remain cool. While some visitors spent the first public day of Art Basel admiring multi-million-dollar paintings, others strayed from the main fair to watch a nude woman examine her body with a hand mirror and a war veteran stand silently in a corner. These performance works, […]
In “Selfie Poetics,” Andrew Durbin considers the recent rise of the selfie and poetics in the art world, rethinking how artist-poets self-image through language on the Internet. Against coherency, selfie poetics not only disrupt traditional notions of the poetic, they revise our definition of the self-portrait, too, reimagining our destabilized subjectivity as critically dependent on […]
Controversial website ArtRank treats art like a commodity – tipping investors off about who’s hot and who’s toxic. Site founder Carlos Rivera talks bubbles, bonuses and backlashes. A few years ago, Carlos Rivera was a virtual unknown, even in the art circles where he earned his living. He was just another gallerist, running a West […]
Richard Prince is making art by recycling Instagram screenshots. Dealers are hawking art via Instagram. The Met has even retained an Instagram guru “to play catch-up to figure out how best to exploit this online pictorial medium.” A four-year-old app is dominating the art conversation as no purely art-related topic is. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the average person would be […]
Milo Moiré, a Swiss performance artist you may remember for creating a painting from paint-filled eggs she dropped out of her vagina outside Art Cologne, paid a visit to Art Basel in Basel on June 19. Or at least attempted to. After having her skin painted with the names of the articles of clothing she wasn’t wearing […]
For everyone not gallivanting around to the flurry of fairs, parties, and events that make up Art Basel, we’ve picked the best, most FOMO-inducing Instagram photos to make you feel (if just momentarily) like you’re right in the middle of it all. For those of you who are there? See how Klaus Biesenbach, Marina Abramović, and Simon […]
The Art Newspaper: What characterises the art of our time? Harald Falckenberg: In recent years, art has become ever more dominant with large-scale public events and huge prices for important works that only a few wealthy people, leading art institutions and multi-national companies can afford. Having emerged from the 1960s avant-garde’s goal of anchoring popular […]
On a recent spring morning, some 90 minutes before the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened, Dave Krugman, a 26-year-old photo retoucher from Bushwick, Brooklyn, ushered six friends into its cavernous halls through a side door near East 81st Street. Unimpeded by crowds, they roamed the world-famous exhibitions. Mr. Krugman photographed his fellow adventurers posing above […]
Get your ducks in a row.
The row around Marina Abramović is redundant, as the story of art is one of homages and remakes. But that’s not to say there isn’t a problem. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there […]
A group of curators and art historians have argued that the Serbian artist’s latest performance piece, due to open at London’s Serpentine Gallery on 11 June, fails to acknowledge the influence of another artist’s earlier work. A prestigious group of curators and art historians have written to the gallery questioning why Abramović’s latest performance piece […]
The Shard has spawned a host of angular glassy lumps across the capital. But is this new crystal city full of Shardettes a welcome change? When Renzo Piano casually described his design for London Bridge Tower in a press conference as “a shard … a shard of crystal,” he must have had little idea what […]
The furore around the work, complete with vodka bottles and pregnancy tests, helped to give lift-off to Emin’s career. Few pieces of art have divided opinion quite like My Bed – in whichTracey Emin claimed to have spent a week after a bad break-up. Complete with vodka bottles, cigarette butts and pregnancy tests, the installation didn’t […]
Is there anything left to say about Richard Prince‘s notorious “Canal Zone” paintings and their attendant legal controversy? The case was finally settled, leaving its effect on copyright law uncertain. Art-world scolds who railed against Prince’s appropriation of photographer Patrick Cariou’s Rastafarian images have moved onto new causes. The dozen or so pictures, looking as if some of them might be […]
BAC is off to Frieze NY for the 3rd instalment of this excellent Fair (hopefully it will be a little less, ah, dramatic, this time…). Lots of other things are happening in New York at the same time, including the “satellite” Art Fairs: NADA, PULSE, and even “outsiders” are invited, to the Outsider Art Fair. […]
In May 2013, German artist Gerhard Richter broke his own record when his 1968 painting “Domplatz, Mailand,” which looks like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph, sold at auction for $37 million, the highest amount for any living artist. It was a record he held for six months, until Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” smashed it, selling for […]
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “ART IS A LIE THAT JUST WON’T DIE,” 2014. HD Quicktime Movie, 6 minutes. Online. Everything you need to know about what makes art great, Museums and collecting, the life on an artist, and family – especially Mothers! And that’s a lot for a Video to cover – in just 6 […]
The painting caught Pei-Shen Qian’s eye, but it was the price that affected him deeply. Mr. Qian, browsing in a booth at a Manhattan art show a decade ago, had stumbled across his own work: a forgery of a modern masterpiece that he had recently completed. He had sold it for just a few hundred […]