Photographer Nan Goldin burst on to the art scene in 1986 with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, hugely influential images that chronicled the druggy New York demi-monde she and her friends inhabited. Now 60, her latest work is all about children. So has the queen of hardcore photography finally mellowed?
By 1991, Mike Kelley had emerged as a crucial artist in Los Angeles, at the head of a pack that had pushed into prominence in the previous decade. His riveting sculptures reassembled from ratty stuffed animals, crocheted dolls and other tattered children’s playthings that he scavenged from thrift shops were also generating considerable critical attention […]
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]
‘Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,’ at the Brooklyn Museum. “A change is gonna come,” the soul singer Sam Cooke promised in his 1964 hit song. And so it did. Officially, it arrived fast, with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act that year. In reality, its progress was killingly slow, and […]
LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public […]
Disposable and deteriorated, the developer trays used by photographers are usually discarded. Brooklyn-based photographer and printer John Cyr has discovered the beauty in these battered trays, where so many images first appeared.
The late German artist Sigmar Polke was not the type to make things easy for anyone. After trying to interview him in Los Angeles in 1995, reporter Kristine McKenna wrote that she felt like Margaret Dumont “trying to get a straight answer out of the Marx Brothers.” That same year, British critic Adrian Searle showed up at Polke’s […]
In the weeks since Art Basel in Hong Kong announced that its 2015 edition would take place nearly two months earlier than in the past, various lines of speculation about the rationale behind the move have been buzzing. With the vast amount of advanced planning that goes into pulling off a major art fair, the packed schedules […]
Could it be? Are we already post-Internet? It’s a bemusing term you may have heard floating around the art world recently, and now a new exhibition called “Art Post-Internet” at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—organized by critic/curator Karen Archey with writer/gallerist Robin Peckham—has set out to encapsulate the budding movement, which may be the most significant of its kind […]
The season of art market performance reports is upon us, and keeping up with them all can be an all-consuming—and sometimes baffling—affair. In the last month various entities have declared 2013 to have been both the best year ever and the second best year ever for art sales, while also (erroneously) declaring art to be […]
From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around. Check it out.
LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]
Yuxweluptun’s abstract paintings can seem off-kilter with his figurative works but, in fact, they share features. Dubbed “Ovoidism” by Yuxweluptun, the works employ the figure of the ovoid, although here, it is the sole graphic element. He also uses a more limited palette in the abstracts and, unlike the smooth surfaces of the landscapes, the […]
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — TEFAF Maastricht (The European Fine Art Fair) is in full swing, and during its 12-day run the fair will show off works from 275 of the world’s premier art and antiques dealers. Art+Auction Magazine editor-at-large and ARTINFO market reporter Judd Tully traveled to Maastricht to find out how much you can expect to pay for […]
In art schools, there is an ancient rule – maybe first promulgated by Her Worship Marina Abramovic – decreeing that it’s not performance art until a girl takes her clothes off. This is a still from a brand-new six-minute video by Jennifer Bornstein, on view in the Whitney Biennial, that feels as though it’s revisiting that […]
Yoko Ono (B. 1933, Tokyo) has been recognized as one of the most outstanding avant-garde artists for over sixty years. She is a pioneer in many of the artistic fields to which she has dedicated her life, and is considered to be one of the precursors to conceptual art, film and performance art. She is […]
MAASTRICHT — Vincent van Gogh’s “Moulin de la Galette” from 1887 is one of four of the Dutch painter’s works — and one of many stunning discoveries — on view at TEFAF, The European Fine Art Fair, which opened Thursday in Maastricht, The Netherlands. “Moulin de la Galette,” which was last exhibited in public in 1965, is […]
Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste’s true talents, her reach and influence. ‘The ladder John had to climb up was very high,” recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that […]
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 […]