Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work. Now they’re expected to provide money, too. In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time […]
For Wendy Maitland, Town Residential’s president of sales, an Oscar-winning director client of hers was a typical real estate shopper with typical requests. He had a seven-figure budget and was keen to buy into one of the many new luxury condo complexes sprouting around Manhattan. The client was downsizing from a huge country house in Connecticut since his […]
Galleries like Sprüth Magers and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel quietly but fiercely compete for the city’s artists. The grand openings of the Los Angeles branches of European galleries Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth (called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel), on 23 February and 13 March respectively, are sure to generate even more buzz about the […]
As far as a painting’s hammer price is concerned, other, less noble considerations matter a great deal more than the picture’s intrinsic quality. Determining the market value of a picture can be a surprisingly heartless experience. There before you stands a fine portrait by a great artist, whose energy and creative genius you see emblazoned […]
A lawyer, a financier, an art advisor, and a journalist walk into a room… It sounds like the start to a bad gallery dinner joke. But at The Armory Show the topic of discussion was serious: “How to Optimize the Unpredictable Art Market.” In a testament to the topic’s immediacy, moderator and Financial Times columnist […]
Second careers are a chance to nurture primary passions Laing Brown decided to “retire” from his 30-plus-year career as a lawyer and partner at two of Canada’s largest law firms. But instead of carrying on as a consultant or spending his days playing golf, Mr. Brown and his wife, Kathleen Brown, also a lawyer, decided […]
Do words limit our experience of a given artwork? Gustave Flaubert believed that, “Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity.” Art critic John Bergerwrote: “When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision.” And what if the words are in the art? Expressed by the artist herself? From Cubism to […]
Never has the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20″ held as much weight for anyone as it has for collectors and other art world observers in the wake of the recent high-profile Knoedler forgery trial. The case was settled a few days ago (February 10), but not without the art world experiencing a mountain of frequently cringe-worthy evidence and an earful […]
Working across a wide range of media, French artist Philippe Parreno came to prominence during the 1990s and is known both for his collaborative approach to artmaking (with artists such as Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon and Tino Sehgal) and for treating exhibitions as objects or artworks in themselves, rather than as a collection of discrete […]
Philippe Parreno is one of the most significant French artists of the past two decades. Throughout his work, which includes film, video, sound and writing and drawing, the artist has always explored the borders between reality and its representation utilizing the vocabulary and means typically associated with a variety of media such as radio, television, […]
100 years ago today, on February 5, 1916, the now-legendary Cabaret Voltaire—the artist hangout that gave birth to the Dada movement—was opened in Zurich. Dada—which advocated coincidence as a leading creative principle—deliberately contravened all known and traditional artistic styles at the time. It was championed by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, […]
Philippe Parreno will undertake this year’s Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall, at Tate ~Modern opening on 4 October 2016. Parreno is a French artist who works across film, video, sound, sculpture, performance and information technology. A key artist of his generation, Parreno explores the borders between reality and fiction and is known for investigating and […]
Political art has changed over the past 50 years. Unlike the protest art of an earlier era, much of the most interesting new work feels slippery and evasive, as if reluctant to speak its mind. In part, this is a reflection of different, though not necessarily evolved, thinking. We’ve abandoned old beliefs in utopias, in […]
If a collector wanted to buy a Frank Stella at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, he could have walked up to the booth of New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, which represents Frank Stella. Or, he could have walked up to the booth of London and New York gallery Dominique Lévy, which also represents Frank Stella. […]
Florence Waters takes a closer look at the life and work of the woman behind the dots — the world’s most popular artist of 2015. Illustrated with works offered in our forthcoming Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions in London. 1. Painting became an act of rebellion for Kusama when she was just a child. Her […]
The first decades of the 20th century were among the most fruitful periods of artistic production of the modern era, especially for the still-fledgling art of photography. In New York, just after the turn of the century, a small circle of photographic visionaries revolved around the magnetic figure of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), whose influence as […]
Classified images leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden will figure as artworks at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its Laura Poitras solo exhibition, “Astro Noise,” opening next week. In an unprecedented sprint from headline to gallery wall, news of the covert intelligence program to which the works pertain will have scarcely broken […]
Since its inception in the early 1800s, photography has been the site of immense change as it evolved from a scientific challenge to a world-shaking mass medium over the past 200 years. The digital revolution of the new millennium has brought on both never-before-seen capabilities and a new ubiquity of the photographed image, developments artists […]
With unstable markets and cautious collectors, art dealers everywhere are adopting leaner strategies that make the most of their gallery’s resources. Driving 40% of annual gallery revenue, according to TEFAF’s 2015 Art Market Report, art fairs remain a crucial part of the bottom line, providing global reach without the need for multiple locations. The opacity of […]
We received the penned note from Miranda at the end of a punishing day. It was just two sentences long, but it raised a slew of legal issues and a few other concerns. “I am about to commission a sculpture of my husband, Carlo, for a 10-year anniversary,” she wrote. “Anything I should consider?” Oh, […]