Zoe Williams goes among the women as fetish furniture at the RA’s new show to find out. I find it very difficult to have an authentic response to work that has generated a lot of controversy in the past. My inner contrarian harasses me to disagree with the orthodoxy. So I was all set to […]
This year’s Turner Prize shortlisted artists are hooked on materiality. Not some slick, seamless production-value fetishism geared for maximum visible impact, but almost the exact opposite—a thoughtful, often overly self-conscious, politically inflected take on materials and media, on production and reproduction, in which the frictionless transparency of images is jammed by the clunky inertia of […]
Robert Gober’s retrospective “The Heart Is Not A Metaphor,” which opens on October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a strange and moving survey of domestic unease, seemingly pointless labor, and creeping horror, among other things. You enter the exhibition past a pair of very different works: “X Pipe Playpen,” […]
To say that Blenheim Palace is grand is an understatement: It’s epic. Entering the estate, with its stunning view of the open fields and humongous 18th-century mansion looming at the back, one feels like they have slipped into the opening credits of cult TV drama Downton Abbey. The Palace, built in 1704 by architect Sir […]
There has been a lot of bickering about what Conceptual art is/was; who began it; who did what when with it; what its goals, philosophy, and politics were and might have been. I was there, but I don’t trust my memory. I don’t trust anyone else’s either. – Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts” The term “concept art” […]
The big man of Beijing’s new show fills the former prison with a giant rainbow dragon and Lego models of 175 prisoners of conscience, from Nelson Mandela to Edward Snowden. The artist’s bravery and commitment are extraordinary. Welcome to prison, and a celebration of liberty. Ai Weiwei, the big man of Beijing, has spent years […]
Since his release from an 81-day detention by Chinese authorities in 2011, Beijing-based artist and activist Ai Weiwei has not kept silent, despite stipulations that prohibited interviews and other activities. In the United States, he was the subject of the traveling retrospective “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” which wound up its tour at the Brooklyn […]
Is an exhibition ever too beautiful for its own good? Jenny Holzer’s new show at Cheim & Read, Dust Paintings, is ravishing. But the sensuality of these text-based abstractions, done in oil on linen in mostly muted colors, runs counter to their content, which is derived from declassified government reports of brutalization and death during the […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Judging from the large bags of colorful Legos on the floor and dozens of plastic base plates piled on tables, this room could have been the activities station for a well-funded summer camp. And the five women and men drifting in and out, slicing open boxes and rooting around for the right […]
Its Wikipedia entry calls it “a short and violent movement,” and even compared with the aesthetic extremes of the 1960s, the unrelenting art of Vienna Actionism stands apart. After the passage of fifty years, the questions it raised about the limits and origins of art remain no less troubling or closer to resolution. The four […]
When John Baldessari started creating his text paintings in the mid 1960s, only a handful of artists had ever trifled with the idea. There were Roy Lichtenstein‘s paintings from comics, and the Cubists had integrated newspaper clippings in their work, but nobody had been brave enough to exhibit paintings that simply offered text. For one […]
The artist Ai Weiwei, confined to his house and studio in Beijing, his passport confiscated by the state, has been roaming the corridors and state rooms of Blenheim Palace, one of the grandest houses in England, through a 3D computer model. He has never set foot in the gigantic home of the Duke of Marlborough, but is […]
Protesters swarmed the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio, Corsica on Tuesday and Wednesday, demanding that it remove Andres Serrano’s ever-incendiary work Piss Christ (1987). As Le Figaro reported, approximately 50 people stood outside the museum holding a large sign which read “PISS CHRIST FORA,” or “Piss Christ out.” The protesters contend that the work is an affront to Catholicism and an “insult to every Corsican,” the […]
Since the dawn of the avant-garde, artists have striven to challenge the boundaries set by conventional painting—the traditional use of oil, acrylic, tempura, and other mediums designated by the Academy as appropriate for dignified employment on canvas. Modern art, especially, unleashed an onslaught of new and unusual art processes, beginning with the Cubists’ magpie use of […]
The selfie isn’t a 21st-century invention. Buzz Aldrin has reminded us on Twitter that he took the first space selfie in 1966. Here’s a selection of other early examples of the form – from the 1830s to the 1980s.
Over the past decade, the Middle East’s participation in the international art world has increased dramatically. Across the Gulf states, world-class museums have been built at a galloping clip, art fairs have blossomed, and Qatar has emerged as quite possibly the largest buyer of contemporary art on the planet. Middle Eastern artists have become stars on the […]
On Kawara, a Conceptual artist who devoted his career to recording the passage of time as factually and self-effacingly as art would allow, died in late June in New York City, where he had worked for 50 years. He was 81. Working in painting, drawing and performance, Mr. Kawara kept himself in the background and […]
An early Damien Hirst painting titled Bombay Mix has become the source of controversy London, reports the BBC. The artist is blocking the sale of the piece, claiming that his company, Science Ltd, still holds the certificate for the spot painting, which was painted directly on the wallpaper of a London house in 1988, and is therefore the piece’s […]
“Scanner Room” – an installation designed specifically for the gallery space that engulfs this space completely, creating an environment constructed by light and filled with it. The form is minimalist, its most important element is a constant, monochrome flow of light that materializes and diffuses itself subsequently. The space has been created for people to […]
