The Architect Who Became a Diamond

A conceptual artist devises an ingenious plan for negotiating access to a hidden archive. Last September, in Guadalajara, an American conceptual artist named Jill Magid and a pair of gravediggers convened at the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres, a monument where the most celebrated citizens of the state of Jalisco are entombed. With them were two […]

Why the Art World Is Desperately Seeking Forgotten Artists

In May, the painter Carmen Herrera surveyed her first US solo show in a decade at New York’s Lisson Gallery and wept with joy. She had ample reason to. Besides being represented by one of the world’s most important galleries, she had canvases on view in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the […]

The 10 Most Controversial Art Projects of the Last Century

Has much changed since Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain? The art world is no stranger to the gasp-inducing project or performance: in fact, it seems at times to thrive on it. In these dog days of summer, when the art world slows down and the tumbleweeds approach Chelsea, we’re excited to hear that provocative exhibitions are still […]

What Was Abstract Expressionism? A Paint-Splattered Primer on America’s First Major Art Movement

You don’t need to be an art insider to hear the term “Abstract Expressionists” used to describe the inspiration behind all manner of contemporary painting, but what was the original movement all about? Hint: it’s more than just Jackson Pollock drinking and tossing paint on a canvas. In this brief essay from Phaidon’s Art in Time: […]

Vantablack – Can an artist ever really own a colour?

Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use it. Colour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist […]

The Top 10 Most Expensive Living American Artists of 2016

Each year, artnet News rounds up the art world’s top-performing artists at auction, across categories. But as the 2016 results come in from the first half of auction season, not much has changed since we last mined theartnet Price Database to identify the most expensive living American artists of 2015—which isn’t a good thing. Similar to […]

Tate Modern has finally won me over – with art

Great art museums need great art. That should go without saying, but the new Tate Modern is so architecturally exhilarating that I started to wonder: perhaps you really can have a museum where it doesn’t matter much what’s in it because the experience of walking around is so enjoyable and cool. I love the Switch […]

What Was Fluxus? A Brief Guide to the Irreverent, Groundbreaking Art Movement

Fluxus was a loose confederation of international artists in the 1960s working in performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and even correspondence art (art sent through the postal service). It was often, though not exclusively, political in tone. Fluxus works shared similarities with the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow, particularly in the way they blurred distinctions […]

7 Great Artist Duos That Shaped Art History

While the lone wolf artist has long been romanticized for its singular (if not god-given) genius, the creative duo has also, many times over, recast the shape of art. Below, we explore seven of art history’s game-changing partnerships during the 20th century. For these pioneering artists—from Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Marina Abramovic & Ulay—collaboration was […]

Real Estate for the 1 Percent, With Art for the Masses

THE sculptor Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” For most of the last century, residential and commercial developments in New York City tended to marry architecture and art with that […]

Antony Gormley: Humans are building ‘a vast termites’ nest’ of greed

Antony Gormley says his first White Cube exhibition in four years, which opens in September, is driven by “more of a sense of urgency” than any other show he has done. From the warming of our climate and the acidification of our seas to cities dominated by skyscrapers – “nothing more than expressions of virile […]

Francis Bacon’s New Major Exhibition Will Transform Our Understanding of His Work

Last week, there were two major events relating to  Francis Bacon and, on this occasion at least, they didn’t have anything to do with the artist’s record-breaking market, but with a renewed and in-depth understanding of his fascinating oeuvre and artistic process. On June 30, the Francis Bacon Estate published a new catalogue raisonné, presenting […]

Wonders and blunders: what makes a great museum?

Artists, architects and curators tell us about the spaces they love—and hate. What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque […]

How I became the bomb – Ulay, Oh (Music Video)

When I first saw the vid of the reunion of the two artists Marina Ambramovic and Frank Uwe Laysiepen aka ‘Ulay’ after 33 years of being apart, I was so touched by how they look at each other eyes and you can tell that true love never dies. 🙂 Watch the Video – Click Here. […]

Observing the Drama of the World: A Q&A with Stefan Brüggemann

For his first show at Hauser & Wirth, which opened Wednesday, June 29, Mexico City- and London-based artist Stefan Brüggemann covered the walls of the first floor of the gallery’s Upper-East-Side outpost with spray-painted scareheads ripped from recent news stories and quotes culled from classic films. Part of his ongoing “Headlines and Last Line in […]

Christo: The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in Sulzano, Italy

The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in Sulzano, Italy The first work by Bulgarian artist Christo in more than a decade is seemingly miraculous; three kilometres of shimmering marigold walkways floating atop Italy’s Lake Iseo, giving visitors the power to walk on water. First conceived in 1970 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude – his partner in life and […]

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye. Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead […]

The Art Market: now what?

This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision. To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with […]

Champions of a Monster Polaroid Yield to the Digital World

Over the last eight years, as cameras have become smaller and smaller — tiny enough to fit on a pair of glasses or inside a swallowable pill —John Reuter has been working to stave off extinction of one of the largest cameras ever made, so big and irredeemably analog that it feels, he says, “as […]