This time last year, my editor asked me to put together a list of the most important essays of 2014, and I drew a blank. I asked around. By far the most common answer I got from peers was, “Nothing comes to mind.” Even the professionals, who’ve got their eyes glued to this stuff like Malcolm McDowell […]
1. Art Basel in Miami Beach (see last year’s report) As the main event, Art Basel in Miami Beach is the country’s largest art fair, with 267 galleries from around the world showing in a massive hall featuring more than 500,000 square feet of exhibition space. Now under the leadership of new director Noah Horowitz, the fair will showcase work by […]
On Monday morning, the artist Jeff Koons stood in Gagosian Gallery’s West 21st Street location in Chelsea, discussing his new show at the space with a small gathering of reporters. The exhibition features work from his “Gazing Ball” series. For the show, Koons has placed blue reflective spheres on small shelves in front of very […]
The artist’s new show presents repainted versions of masterpieces, from Titian’s Venus and Mars to the Mona Lisa, with a shiny blue sphere placed in front of each. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa – only this version was around three times the size of the original and had a blue sphere on a […]
Notable dealers have chosen to end eponymous enterprises to join larger entities at a partnership level. Such was the case with Gérard Faggionato, who recently joined David Zwirner in London, and Valerie Carberry, who merged with Chicago’s Richard Gray last spring. Veteran contemporary art dealers Esther Schipper and Jorg Johnen are in the process of […]
You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]
Here’s an interesting question: If the world’s economy is filling markets with a pervasive sense of uncertainty, why is the art market picking up steam for yet another season of what would appear to be massive sales? For the very rich, art is a store of value—which is not a very new idea and one […]
The art advisor is a bit of a grab bag of roles—curator, interior designer, dealer, buyer. The line dividing these roles is ever hazier because the sole aim of nearly every art professional is to make a lot of money, and many of them do. Let’s think of advisors as opportunistic personal shoppers for the […]
This was the controversial suggestion of a recent survey. We asked its author and four art-world figures to comment. A Twitterstorm erupted in the US last month over the findings of survey of 8,000 art galleries based in the US, UK and Germany. Cultural researcher and Larry’s List co-founder Magnus Resch found (no surprise here […]
The fall art season is quickly upon us as galleries in New York return from their August hibernation and bring out key shows to chase away the summer languor. To help you navigate the mess of fall openings, we offer up a calendar of some of the exhibitions we’re most anticipating at museums and galleries […]
LONDON — Marc Quinn led the way through his East London studio late last month, past a marble sculpture of a fetus, a photorealist painting of raw meat and a bronze statue of Kate Moss in a yoga position. Entering his workroom, he casually walked over distorted three-dimensional canvases of seascapes strewn across the floor. […]
The common refrain, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” could make a perfect catchphrase for Process Art. A movement that arose in the 1960s and ’70s and has since expanded in definition to describe a general philosophical approach to making art, Process Art places its emphasis on the process and act of artistic creation rather than the […]
Larry Gagosian has built a veritable art sales empire. From humble beginnings as a poster salesman in 1970s Los Angeles, Gagosian has climbed his way to the top. He currently operates 15 spaces in New York, London, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, Paris, and Geneva, where he represents some of the biggest names in contemporary […]
BAC’s last posting re the Seattle Art Fair … Seattle has suffered an inferiority complex and craved a place at the international — or even national — art world table for as long as I’ve been here, and both Seattle Art Fair and Out of Sight stepped up, with remarkable esprit, to finally do something […]
SEATTLE — Paul Allen came ready to shop. Mr. Allen, a billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of this city’s major cultural patrons, strolled the aisles of the inaugural Seattle Art Fair on Thursday, looking to add to his formidable art collection. “Just walking around, I’ve probably seen a half-dozen paintings that I would consider,” […]
A giant beach ball, a pink ice cream truck, and a winding line of people waiting to see art are not sights that people usually associate with perennially gray Seattle. But on Thursday night, most of the 4,000 people who visited the opening night of the inaugural Seattle Art Fair got to experience all three. […]
Amid the seemingly endless schedule of international art fairs that take place around the world each year, all art world eyes will be on Seattle this week, where the inaugural Seattle Art Fair, opens on Thursday July 30 and runs through August 2. Previous attempts at organizing fairs here have never really gotten off the […]
A triumvirate of the world’s biggest galleries—Gagosian, Pace, and David Zwirner—is headed to the Pacific Northwest this month for the debut Seattle Art Fair. Debut fairs are not always expected to be big sales events, dealers often say, but rather opportunities to start to build relationships with new clients. Goff’s expectations are higher than that. […]
Our final (so far) column on Chris Burden, by Peter Schjeldahl – you should read it. Burden adventured alone in wilds that aren’t outside civilized life but that seethe within it. He coolly structured convulsive experience. His mastery of form made him a poet, as in a piece that I knew from hearsay and wrote […]
Fairtigue A term circulating since 2012 and increasingly heard this year as dealers, collectors (and, yes, journalists) struggled to keep abreast of the exploding number of art fairs around the world. 6 more in the article …