Cy Twombly makes me want to plan the art heist of the century

You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]

Ai Weiwei’s Tree Installation At The Royal Academy

“Ai’s trees are made from parts of dead trees that are brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Ai transports these to his studio in Beijing where they are made into trees. As he says, “it’s just like trying to imagine what the tree looked […]

The new reserve currency for the world’s rich is not actually currency

Here’s an interesting question: If the world’s economy is filling markets with a pervasive sense of uncertainty, why is the art market picking up steam for yet another season of what would appear to be massive sales?  For the very rich, art is a store of value—which is not a very new idea and one […]

Can art still shock in the age of the extreme selfie?Can art still shock in the age of the extreme selfie?

Marina Abramović had a gun put to her head. Joseph Beuys shared a gallery with a coyote. But with social media full of shocking images, is it worth today’s artists putting their lives at risk? In 1974, standing expressionless beside a table in a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović began her performance piece Rhythm 0. […]

Turner Prize Sacrifices Visual Punch For Conceptual Filler In Glasgow

What do chorale singers, a craftsman’s showroom, a posh cafe with fur coats thrown over chairs and a library reading room have in common? Yes you guessed it – it must be Turner Prize time again!  This year the latest nominees for this most prestigious British art prize have gone north to Scotland for the first […]

Artlyst Podcast: Tim Marlow And Adrian Locke Discuss Ai Weiwei At The RA

Artlyst recently attended the press view of the Royal Academy of Arts’ landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Where the chief curators of this outstanding show, Tim Marlow, and Adrian Locke were kind enough to give Artlyst – and a host of other journalists – a tour of Ai Weiwei’s impressive retrospective. […]

Artlyst Photo Special: Ai Weiwei At The Royal Academy Of Arts

The Royal Academy of Arts is currently presenting a landmark exhibition of the Honorary Royal Academician, Ai Weiwei. Although Ai is one of China’s leading contemporary artists, his work has not been seen extensively in Britain and the Royal Academy is presenting the first major institutional survey of his artistic output. The exhibition includes significant […]

Right Wing Politician Says Anish Kapoor ‘Has Declared War on France’

Anish Kapoor had no idea what he was getting into when he accepted the invitation to install artworks in the gardens of Versailles. On September 30, right wing politician Fabien Bouglé, a local councilman, published an article on the website of Nouvel Observateur in which he claims that the artist “has declared war on France” […]

Changing order of names is deliberate at Griffin Art Projects

The news release about Griffin Art Projects caught my attention not only because it was about a new gallery opening in Metro Vancouver. What I noticed was how one sentence was worded. Here’s what it said: “The inaugural exhibition has been drawn from the collections of Brigitte and Henning Freybe and Kathleen and Laing Brown . . […]

The New Vancouver Art Gallery: A Generous Building

When the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed their conceptual design for a new building earlier this week, it was evidently a far cry from their current neoclassical courthouse.  Gone are the ionic columns, ornate marble and porticos; instead, Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron has developed a soaring, wood-wrapped structure with boxy levels that recalls West Coast […]

Mapplethorpe Print at Center of Culture Wars Returns to Public Eye

Twenty-five years ago this month, a Cincinnati jury wrote an exclamation point into the story of the culture wars that were raging through art museums and academia. The jury acquitted that city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director of criminal obscenity charges for exhibiting a group of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, graphic sexual images that […]

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?: ‘ART BREAKERS’ and the Art World’s Reality TV Problem

The art advisor is a bit of a grab bag of roles—curator, interior designer, dealer, buyer. The line dividing these roles is ever hazier because the sole aim of nearly every art professional is to make a lot of money, and many of them do. Let’s think of advisors as opportunistic personal shoppers for the […]

2015 Turner Prize Show is Earnest and Experimental but Ultimately Anticlimactic

On Wednesday, the 2015 Turner Prize exhibition held its preview at Tramway, the Glasgow art institution that’s hosting the prize this year.Sarah Munro, the outgoing director of the venue, and Paul Pieroni, co-curator of the exhibition, welcomed the throngs of arts journalists that included the top national newspapers and leading art magazines. Expectations were high. The […]

North Shore art collectors open new gallery

Brigitte and Henning Freybe will show work that might not be shown otherwise. A new public art gallery opening Saturday in North Vancouver is dedicated to showing the work of private collectors. It’s called Griffin Art Projects and is an initiative of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, two of Metro Vancouver’s major art collectors. The opening […]

Anish Kapoor on Vandalism, Instagram, his Moscow Retrospective, and more …

ARTnews: During the walkthrough of the exhibition just now, you pointed to the “S-Curve” sculpture and said that, ‘In the age of Instagram, this is a selfie object.’ Now that you are on Instagram, have you enjoyed seeing the interaction between the art and viewer evolve? Anish Kapoor: I do see that. People look with […]

Anish Kapoor Forced by French Court to Remove Anti-Semitic Vandalism from Versailles Sculpture

Anish Kapoor returns to Versailles tomorrow, September 22, to commence his artistic intervention on the sculpture Dirty Corner, which has been vandalized three times since its installation in the gradens of Versailles in June. But the artist, who initially announced that he would leave the massive steel artwork untouched after it had been smeared with anti-semitic […]

They’re Watching us in Museums: Travor Paglen’s Show at Metro Pictures Takes on Surveillance

Last Thursday afternoon, I received an email from the artist Trevor Paglen. I’ll respect his privacy and not reveal the contents of the message, or the Gmail account he uses, but I’ll tell you about his sign-off. Instead of the standard message, “Sent from my iPhone,” or some cute variation on that along the lines […]

‘These Pictures would Not have been Possible Ten Years Ago”: Woflgang Tillmans on his New Show at David Zwirner Gallery

Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs begin with the German artist asking himself, “Can I do this?” Last week, at a preview of “PCR,” his new show at David Zwirner, in New York, Tillmans pointed out two new photographs of Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, as examples of that process. One of the images is a […]

How to Keep Your Artists Happy: A User’s Guide for Dealers

It’s hard to keep young up-and-coming artists happy, especially if they come with the nickname “generation me.” Whether it’s due to restlessness or a better opportunity, gallery representation can resemble a game of musical chairs. Remember when Julian Schnabel left Mary Boone, who gave him his first show in 1979, for Pace in the 1980s? In another boom […]

The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises

The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]