Tag Archives: Artists

10 Japanese Photographers You Should Know

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Since 1974, when legendary photography historian John Szarkowski introduced New Japanese Photography to the Western audiences at the Museum of Modern Art, critics have lauded the work of this group of artists, from Shomei Tomatsu and Ken Domon to Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyami, for being exceptionally distinct from that of their Western counterparts.Often incomplete and fleeting in quality, these artists’ photographs are no less pronounced today in […]

Sigmar Polke, Bad Ass of German Pop, Rocks MoMA Senseless

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In 1976 I found myself in Düsseldorf, one stop on a mission to gather material for a special “European” issue of Art-Rite magazine (which we never managed to put out). One memorable highlight was a Sigmar Polke exhibition at the Frankfurt Kunsthalle. The entryway was blocked off by wood fencing, probably bought at a garden supply store, but visitors could […]

Why James Franco’s Cindy Sherman Homage at Pace Is Not Just Bad But Offensive

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James Franco’s new exhibition at Pace is bad. It’s not a George W. Bush–caliber train wreck, but it’s close. The exhibition, “New Film Stills,” features 29 photographs from Franco’s series inspired by Cindy Sherman’s seminal “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80). In each black-and-white photograph the artist-actor-scholar appears dressed (or undressed) in women’s clothes, often sporting a wig and makeup, for […]

The History of the Found Object in Art

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Tracey Emin‘s sculpture My Bed (1998) is exactly what it sounds like: the work consists of the artist’s freshly slept-in bed, with crumpled pillows, disheveled sheets, and dirty tissues and other junk (including sanitary items, prophylactics, and liquor bottles) strewn around the footboard. When it debuted at 1999 at London’s Tate, it created an instant commotion in the […]

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries – Video

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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 […]

Top 10 Most Expensive Living German Artists – artnet News

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In the second installment of our series of the world’s most expensive living artists, we focus on the Germans. Artists from the country have seen unprecedented success in recent years. And high-flying auction results have been spread relatively evenly across media, if not between the sexes. Perhaps most interestingly, however, all of the Germans in […]

Indictment Details How to Forge a Masterpiece

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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 […]

Video veteran Joan Jonas to represent US in Venice

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The artist is expected to create a multimedia installation for next year’s Biennale. Joan Jonas has been selected to represent the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale. The video and performance artist is expected to create a site-specific multimedia installation for the US pavilion, one of the most visible and celebrated international platforms for […]

A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage

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The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiweiseen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at theBrooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” […]

Found Everything, Tried Everything, All His Own Way

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A Sigmar Polke Retrospective Opens at MoMA. Get confused is the first and last message of “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010” at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you think, as I do, that some degree of continuing bafflement is a healthy reaction to art, this disorienting contact high of a show is for you. Polke, who […]

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs review – ‘how rich, how marvellous, how alive’

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Bees swarm, swallows swerve, a shark swims the wall … with a pair of giant dress-making scissors, Matisse cut himself free from the miseries of illness and old age, creating luscious cut-outs that unleashed a new art. Adrian Searle eats up a joyous show at Tate Modern. Scissors, paper, pins – these were all it […]

Top 10 Most Expensive Living British Artists – artnet News

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It’s official, the art market is picking up after years spent in a post-crash lull. According to  TEFAF’s much discussed annual art market report, 2013 was the second best year on record, grossing €47.42 billion ($65.45). It was topped only by 2007, the vintage year of the last bubble. In this new series, artnet News […]

Could Silicon Valley Contemporary Be the Next Art Basel?

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The answer is yes and no. Let’s begin with why Silicon Valley Contemporarycould be a success. The obvious allure for creating this new fair, and for the 50-some participating galleries to buy in for its first year, is that the tech sphere headquartered in Silicon Valley is generating more wealth more quickly than anywhere else in […]

Gormley to Hirst: today’s top artists on the genius of Henry Moore

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Ahead of an exhibition of Moore’s work alongside that of today’s artists, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Bruce Nauman and others talk about seeing bubbles in hula-hoops, sculpting from the gut – and how Moore changed what was possible.

Hot New Artists, Getting Hotter

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If the market for contemporary art is in danger of overheating, the first canary in the coal mine will surely be those fashionable young artists whose prices have been driven up by speculators over the past few years. Midseason auctions of affordable works by emerging names are telling temperature gauges for the contemporary market. Phillips’s […]

Jordan Wolfson on Transforming the “Pollution” of Pop Culture Into Art

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There’s an mesmerizing aberration at David Zwirner Gallery, a technological siren that, once it locks its fearsome eyes on you, will drag you deep into the Uncanny Valley and feast on your brain. Occupying its own cavelike room in the gallery, which the viewer is encouraged to enter alone, this animatronic sculpture—a buxom blonde woman in […]

Seattle Art Museum’s First Ai Weiwei Piece Is Baubles

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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases appeared at Seattle Asian Art Museum on April 5, quivering, just waiting to be smashed. Poor vases. Their cheerful, rainbow-candy appearance is so dumb it’s almost touching. They’re baubles with hidden stories, stories that go back two thousand years. But we’ll start with 1993. That year, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing […]

Art Market Analysis: Sigmar Polke vs. Anselm Kiefer at Auction

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In the landmark June 2011 sale at Sotheby’s London, 34 works in the collection of German industrialist Count Christian Duerckheim went up for auction, among them seven paintings by the postwar German artist Sigmar Polke (who had died the year before). Of those paintings, one,Dschungel (Jungle) (1967), brought in $9,245,139, sailing past its high estimate of $6.4 million and […]

Stedelijk Taps Jeff Wall for First Post-Reno Photo Show

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There is good deal of irony in the manner in which Vancouver’s Jeff Wall presents his photograph “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000)—printed on a transparency and mounted on a light box. “The large-scale image is illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights, which Wall began using after seeing light-box advertisements in the late 1970s,” according […]