Where is China’s hidden art money?

A study reveals troubling import/export anomalies between China and the US. Money-laundering, tax evasion and the illicit transfer of cultural heritage objects could be factors explaining large discrepancies that have emerged in an analysis of art shipments between China and the US.  Read on …

Parents of the Judd-Climbing Kid Speak

Remember the kid who climbed on the Donald Judd sculpture at the Tate Modern? Well, her parents have taken to the London Evening Standard to set the record straight. They want the world to know that their daughter, Sissi Belle, was only on the sculpture for a matter of seconds and meant no harm — and that the nine-year-old […]

Our nine-year-old was just being ‘anti-establishment’, say parents of girl who climbed on $10m Tate Modern sculpture

The fashion-designer parents of a young girl who shocked art-lovers by climbing on a multi-million pound sculpture at Tate Modern today said their nine-year-old daughter was simply being “anti-establishment.”  “It’s not right, but they were just interested. Their only crime was to be seduced by a ladder of jewel-coloured shelving. Sissi has always been anti-establishment […]

Classic Meets Contemporary in the Hill Collection – Video

Tomilson Hill and his wife, Janine, have been outfitting? their Upper East Side home with the best of the best that has come to market for decades. The Wall Street financier has an extensive network of dealers and auction-house specialists on the lookout for pieces that might appeal to the couple. The Hill’s collecting strategy: choreographing works […]

Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? Hayward Gallery

Silly, serious and a sensory delight. Work from the artist who won the Turner Prize turning the lights off and on. If you’re suffering from the January blues, hurry to the Southbank Centre where Martin Creed’s exhibition is bound to make you smile. The man best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 by […]

Sobey Art Award Expands Purse to $100K

The Sobey Art Award announced January 27 that it is expanding its purse by nearly 50 percent, solidifying the award’s position as Canada’s leading prize for contemporary artists. Formerly set at $70,000, the Sobey Foundation has increased its total sum to $100,000. The added capital will singularly affect the runners-up, which includes four short-listed artists (who formerly […]

Almost Human: Richard Serra

For those unaware of Serra’s oeuvre, he’s made a name for himself by creating building-sized metal sculptures that often make you feel a little unbalanced when you’re next to them. He makes Art with a capital A, and most of us art folk are taught in our earliest art-school days that his sculptures evoke awe. […]

Martin Creed at the Hayward: the faeces, the phallus …

The Hayward’s Martin Creed show is more like a glorious tour of his mind. Adrian Searle has the time of his life squeezing through balloons, ducking a steel beam – and watching an endless erection. The variety of Creed’s work makes it hard to talk about touch, manner or voice. But they’re there all the […]

Grayson Perry Collects His CBE From Prince Charles At Buckingham Palace

Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize winning artist has collected his CBE from Prince Charles in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Dressing as his alter-ego character Claire, Grayson wore a ‘Mother of the Bride’ midnight blue dress and jacket, heels, and an over-the-top Camilla style black hat complete with ostrich feathers. The Queen’s official spokesman commented; […]

Martin Creed: Lights, love and loss – the artist whose gift grabs the audience

When Creed opens a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery on Wednesday it will be the latest chapter in one of contemporary art’s most glittering careers. It’s hard to believe he was once such a nobody that when this unknown artist sent Work No 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, to Nicholas […]

The Existential Hilarity (or Hilarious Existentialism?) of Jonathan Monk

The artist Jonathan Monk makes work that casts an arch eye on art history, his fellow artists, and the transition of a work from the studio to the gallery to the collector’s wall or museum. In other words, his target is art and the entire artistic process, which he lampoons with wry humor and an unabashed use […]

Where are the Girls? Jemima Kirke on women in art – video

Jemima Kirke of TV show Girls discusses how women have always made art, even if they’ve been absent from the history books (and gallery walls). This short film made by the Tate investigates the role of women as makers, not just muses – from Lee Miller to the Guerrilla Girls.

Testimony of a Cleareyed Witness

Carrie Mae Weems Self portrait 2002

Carrie Mae Weems Charts the Black Experience in Photographs Color and class are still the great divides in American culture, and few artists have surveyed them as subtly and incisively as Carrie Mae Weems, whose traveling 30-year retrospective has arrived at the Guggenheim Museum. From its early candid family photographs, through series of pictures that […]

It’s tough in the middle for New York, ABMB 2013

While it’s a good time to be at the very top or at the emerging end of the market, the middle tier of galleries and artists are feeling the squeeze. We ask New York’s dealers and directors what are the alternatives to the mega gallery system? Check out the Video, it is less than 5 […]

Tracey Emin: confessions of a conservative artist with nothing to say

Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin’s views on life boiled down to bullet points: • She is oppressed as a woman artist. […]

Why there’s nothing racist about the ‘racist chair’

Bjarne Melgaard’s black woman in the shape of a chair – as seen in the now-notorious photoshoot of Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Dasha Zhukova – has been totally misunderstood. The contemporary art world likes to think it has a common touch. While classical music is for the elite and the literary novel a minority taste, the […]

Big Brother Watching Me: Citizen Ai Weiwei, BBC Four

For a film that opened with Ai Weiwei’s statement, “Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one,” there was an irony in the fact that Andreas Johnsen’s Big Brother Watching Me… started practically without words. When the artist was freed in June 2011 following 80 days in prison, one of the conditions […]

Ai Weiwei exhibit as monumental as Miami’s new Perez museum

There couldn’t be a better exhibition to inaugurate the new Perez Art Museum Miami than the traveling solo retrospective from the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Like the museum, Ai Weiwei: According To What? is monumental — physically huge, with a lot to say, and important for Miami. Contemporary Chinese art has been a hot commodity for […]

The Americans Are Coming: Warhol, Burroughs, Lynch

William Burroughs’s photographs offer real insight into his written work. Lynch’s and Warhol’s images pale by comparison. “A picture just means I know where I was every minute,” Andy Warholonce said. “That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” In this instinct, Warhol was, as always, ahead of the game. One senses that he would […]

Peter Doig makes a homecoming in Montreal

At 54, Doig is one of the most talked-about and praised artists in the world, his work housed in many prestigious public and private collections. Last year two Doigs, both painted in the 1990s, sold at auction in London for, respectively, $10.5-million and $12-million. Montreal currently has bragging rights as the sole North American venue […]