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 […]
Untouched since the day she died, Louise Bourgeois’ New York home-cum-studio offers an intimate portrait of the artist. At 13ft wide, the townhouse in New York that was both home and studio to Louise Bourgeois is almost as tiny as the artist herself. It was here, on the site of an old apple orchard, half […]
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 […]
If you go to Kara Walker’s new exhibit, “A Subtlety,” at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, a lot will overwhelm you. You’ll likely wait outside in a line that snakes down Kent Street, across from rowhouses that were once owned by Puerto Rican families and now fetch millions. You’ll sign a waiver absolving the […]
As if his museum-filling Whitney retrospective weren’t enough, Jeff Koons currently has a massive sculpture on view at Rockefeller Center. “Split-Rocker,” presented by Gagosian Gallery and organized by the Public Art Fund and real estate developer Tishman Speyer, is comprised of two halves, one the recreated head of a toy pony rocker that belonged to his son, the […]
Eyes in the wall, coins glued to the floor: Gander’s new show at Manchester Art Gallery is full of spoof and childish wonder – he’s having a laugh, but is it at our expense? The eyes swivel and follow me round the room, blinking with an echoing clack! Insouciant eyebrows are raised then furrow with […]
When I first saw Odalisque at Artifake, I found it difficult to look at her. So rather than do that, I wandered off to look at the other works in the gallery as I thought about what so upset me about her. In part it was her gaze and her powerfully strong posture. But mostly it was […]
Can money buy critical immunity? It certainly seems so, judging by critics’ response to the Whitney Museum’s retrospective devoted to the most expensive living artist,Jeff Koons. In this week’s edition of Critical Reduction, we boil down eight critics’ takes on the shiny extravaganza, which, befitting of such a divisive artist, tend to be either vividly enthusiastic or vehemently dismissive. […]
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 […]
If I had to sum up American history in a word, I wouldn’t use racism,though obviously that’s a biggie. I’d pick hokum. I put it right up there withliberty, as in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” a passage which itself could be taken for hokum, written as it was by a man who owned slaves. However, I […]
Art is a “platform for the future,” Jeff Koons announced at yesterday’s press conference at the Whitney. What that means is anyone’s guess, but he followed that up by explaining that he’s 59 and hopes to be making art for at least another three decades. In short, while this may be his first New York […]
There are so many strange, disconcerting aspects to Jeff Koons, his art and his career that it is hard to quite know how to approach his first New York retrospective, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s largest survey devoted to a single artist. First there are the notorious sex pictures from his “Made in Heaven” […]
Given that he’s a goliath figure in the art world whose output spans three decades, it may come as a surprise that Jeff Koons’s Whitney retrospective is the artist’s first major solo show at a New York museum. The exhibition offers 150 works dating back to 1978, giving visitors a comprehensive look at the former commodities trader’s ambitious and diverse artistic […]
A titanic presence in American postwar art, Jeff Koons is an icon whose popular fame, instantly recognizable sculptures, and consistent status as the most expensive living artist ensure that he will be remembered for a long, long time to come. And that’s not even considering their value as works of art, an appraisal that will have its […]
The lighting in this long and cavernous atelier is quite dim—the only light stems from a large lamp shining on the paintings of First Nations artist Shawn Hunt—emotive, beguiling fusions of dimension and colour. “What I’m trying to do is continue the long line of creating art that my people have done over the years,” […]
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 […]
Carl Andre is credited with changing the history of sculpture. Now nearly 80, Andre once scrounged industrial materials — timber, bricks, squares and ingots of metal — and arranged them on the floor. No pedestals, no joints and no altering of the surfaces. In 1970, the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan gave the young artist a […]
Everything about the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is over-the-top. That includes the press-conference-cum-love-in that opened Tuesday’s media preview, during which museum director Adam Weinberg whipped himself into a subdued but hyperbolic frenzy, rhapsodizing about how Koons’s artistic career had a partial genesis in a 1974 Jim Nutt exhibition Jeff saw, age […]
The week leading up to the press preview for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art marked a change of seasons. (Disclosure: Biennale curator Juan Gaitan is a friend, and participating artist Judy Radul is my partner.) Gone were the cold winds and grey skies of winter; in their place, golden mornings, tawny afternoons and […]