Manifesta 10 opens at St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum this Saturday. To some—likely the roaming art biennale’s curator, Kasper König, among them—that sole fact is accomplishment enough. Since König signed on to head up the exhibition, much has changed on the ground in Russia: a swath of anti-gay legislation and censorship, and the Kremlin’s growing expansionist tendencies with the annexation […]
Midway through the Whitney Museum’s Jeff Koons retrospective, you come upon “Banality.” The series, unveiled in 1988 at three galleries concurrently (Sonnabend in New York, Donald Young in Chicago, and Max Hetzler in Cologne), made Koons the neo-Pop god that he is today. It consists of a series of man-sized kitsch figurines. “In my ‘Banality’ series I started […]
Richard Prince is making art by recycling Instagram screenshots. Dealers are hawking art via Instagram. The Met has even retained an Instagram guru “to play catch-up to figure out how best to exploit this online pictorial medium.” A four-year-old app is dominating the art conversation as no purely art-related topic is. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the average person would be […]
Milo Moiré, a Swiss performance artist you may remember for creating a painting from paint-filled eggs she dropped out of her vagina outside Art Cologne, paid a visit to Art Basel in Basel on June 19. Or at least attempted to. After having her skin painted with the names of the articles of clothing she wasn’t wearing […]
“What do you think about the future?,” Hans Ulrich Obrist asks French painterPierre Soulages in the catalogue for his current double exhibition at Dominique Lévy and Emmanuel Perrotin galleries. “It doesn’t belong to me,” he answers. That’s an astute assessment of the work, even if it is also part of the stubborn charm of his black paintings.
Let’s face it, in today’s cutthroat contemporary art market, it’s not enough that you’re a millionaire, or even a billionaire, when it comes to collecting art for your homes. These days it’s all about access. Whether you are sitting in the auction salesroom fighting for an eight-figure Francis Bacon or jetting off to Switzerland for next week’s […]
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 […]
For centuries, the art world and art market were dominated by men—just look at Giorgio Vasari’sThe Lives of the Artists, or, more recently, Jonathan Jones’s all-male list of the greatest artworks ever—but that’s beginning to change. Women now occupy top positions in every sector of the art world, and though they are still paid less than their male colleagues […]
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 […]
The Berlin show is vast, Ai’s largest ever, spanning 32,300 square feet in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Most of the works are new, tracing the time since his relationship with the government went sour ahead of the 2008 Olympics. They also tend to take a more personal tone, playing up (for better or worse) the celebrity status […]
Chris Burden In 1972, visitors attending Burden’s show at Mizuno Gallery in Los Angeles were treated to what appeared to be a crime scene, with a covered cadaver lying on La Cienega Boulevard, surrounded by police flares. In fact, it was the artist himself “making a piece of sculpture,” as he later put it. He […]
In spite of countless false starts and snowy regressions, it is technically spring in New York now (really!), and it is therefore open season for public art. The city’s parks are quickly filling with public art as outdoor exhibitions open in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. From a reclining giant in Queens and a deconstructed duplicate […]
The global art market outlook for 2014 is extremely bullish, according to the latest TEFAF Art Market Report published today by the European Fine Art Foundation. Prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew, the much anticipated annual report tracking global art market movements says 2013 was the best year on record, other than 2007, and only just shy of […]
Indomitable. That’s how Brad Pitt described Steve McQueen during the Oscars Ceremony last night, when 12 Years a Slave—the harrowing story of a man sold into slavery, co-produced by Pitt and directed by McQueen—won Best Picture award. McQueen is no doubt a film force to be reckoned with, embraced and feted by Hollywood. And it’s within […]
The truth of the art market is that art sells better at auction than it does in the galleries. This is primarily due to the “new buyer” phenomenon, which for the time being is what rules the day. All hail the rule of the auction season! Here’s my take on the recent sales in London. […]