This summer, we’re taking a look once again at the top ten British artists over the past ten years. Looking at the artnet Price Database, we kick off with the top artists by lot, and then give a list of artists by value over the same period. Comparing it to last year’s ten-year look at […]
Amid the impostures that sometimes pass for 21st-century art, Doig’s record-breaking compositions are jewels of imagination and haunting vision. It must be the most expensive canoe in history. This week in Manhattan a painting by Edinburgh-born Peter Doig of a small white boat lost in a tangle of weeds and tree stumps in some remote […]
Caravaggio, Bruegel and Van Gogh all made studies of the poor in spite of rich patronage. Why aren’t more artists doing that now? Art has a long history of entertaining the rich. From ancient artisans who made gold drinking cups for kings, to the artists of today who sell installations to plutocrats, art has been a […]
There are many sides to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Those lucky enough to visit his studio complex at Barjac in the South of France encounter a staggering array of installations, underground tunnels, and tottering concrete towers resembling some contemporary equivalent to the fortifications of medieval Tuscany. But wisely, the Royal Academy […]
Seventy kilometers west of Doha lies the Brouq Nature Reserve, a sand spit in the Gulf of Bahrain where Qataris like to camp and wax nostalgic about their grandparents’ nomadic Bedouin lifestyle. To get there, you drive an hour along a highway bordered by electrical towers and plastic barriers that prevent blowing sand from drifting […]
Has the Turner prize lost its power to shock? No – thanks to James Richards’s sphincter shots. But it’s Tris Vonna-Michell’s spellbinding spoken-word travelogues that deserve to win. What a heartening way to celebrate 30 years of the Turner prize. People are always saying the Turner, which shocked the nation with Tracey Emin’s unmade bed […]
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” […]
Phillips announced the opening of a new auction house and exhibition space in the exclusive address of Berkeley Square, London, on Monday. The official opening will take place during October’s buzzing Frieze Art Fair week. The relocation is part of an ambitious plan to propel Phillip beyond its long-standing third-place position in the auctioneering game (“Ostrowski […]
If you could have dinner with just one 20th-century art historian, you might want to choose Leo Steinberg (1920-2011). Known for delivering garrulously wide-ranging lectures and papers that were as lucid as they were revolutionary, he was also admired for his wit, dropping in enough jazzy lines that Woody Allen could have cherry-picked them for material. The following is […]
LONDON — Sometimes art can be difficult to understand. Sometimes the art market can be even more baffling. Back in December, the contemporary dealer David Zwirnersaid in a New Yorker profile that art was “an industry in its golden age.” His point seemed to have been proven during the June 17 preview of the Art Basel fair in […]
Beuys, Richter, Kiefer, Polke, Ernst … such a formidable lineup shows up British contemporary artists for the commercial, over-hyped and celebrity focused lightweights that they are. Germany has proved its global footballing eminence by winning the 2014 World Cup, yet soccer is just one of many things Germans excel at. There’s also art. What is the […]
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 […]
Art Basel and the London summer auctions are behind us, and the auction market continues to hit unprecedented peaks. But today’s records and art stars came straight out of yesterday’s headline-grabbing auctions. With that in mind, we take a look back at some major milestones of the last few decades—from the 1973 sale that arguably […]
With an overwhelming array of booths by top international galleries filling two full floors, Art Basel presents so much first-rate art that it’s hard to believe such visual splendor is only on view for a few days every June, to be immediately dispersed onto the walls of collectors around the globe. Artspace toured the fair to tease out […]
The furore around the work, complete with vodka bottles and pregnancy tests, helped to give lift-off to Emin’s career. Few pieces of art have divided opinion quite like My Bed – in whichTracey Emin claimed to have spent a week after a bad break-up. Complete with vodka bottles, cigarette butts and pregnancy tests, the installation didn’t […]
In May 2013, German artist Gerhard Richter broke his own record when his 1968 painting “Domplatz, Mailand,” which looks like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph, sold at auction for $37 million, the highest amount for any living artist. It was a record he held for six months, until Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” smashed it, selling for […]
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 […]
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.
If the title of Jens Hoffmann‘s latest exhibition. “Other Primary Structures,” rings a bell, it’s because it’s a revisiting one of the most important American art exhibitions of the 20th century: “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” the 1966 exhibition organized at the same museum by the pathbreaking curator Kynaston McShine that changed the aesthetic course of American art. […]
The herd is spooked. That’s one interpretation of why there has been so much outrage over the the borderline heretical views that the collector Stefan Simchowitz espoused in Artspace‘s recent interview with him—what he said has evidently struck a chord that resonates jarringly with collectors, dealers, artists, curators… everyone, really. A collector who has amassed a hoard of recent art, […]