Out of Site: Finding Robert Smithson’s New Jersey

Montclair show tours the land artist’s Garden State legacy. On a frigid morning this past winter, the art historian, critic and curator Phyllis Tuchman was guiding her blue Mercedes sedan through the desolate parking lot of a shopping plaza in Bayonne, N.J., past a Super Stop & Shop, a Starbucks and a Houlihan’s, toward an […]

Connecting Polke’s Dots: MoMA Decodes the Work of a Tricky Postwar Master

The late German artist Sigmar Polke was not the type to make things easy for anyone. After trying to interview him in Los Angeles in 1995, reporter Kristine McKenna wrote that she felt like Margaret Dumont “trying to get a straight answer out of the Marx Brothers.” That same year, British critic Adrian Searle showed up at Polke’s […]

They Clicked With Investors—Now What? Who Will Win the Race to Sell Art Online?

For two years running, the website Artsy threw one of the glitziest parties at Art Basel Miami Beach, the 2012 edition a Chanel-sponsored blowout at Soho Beach House that went until 3 a.m. Just look at Patrick McMullan! Lenny Kravitz! The Brant Brothers! Dasha Zhukova! Wendi Murdoch! Demi Moore! Vito Schnabel! Pharrell Williams! In December, 2013, […]

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at the Museum of Modern Art

Two years ago, when the late Ileana Sonnabend’s family donated Robert Rauschenberg’s famous artwork Canyon (1959) to the Museum of Modern Art, a condition of the gift was that the museum put on a show about the legendary art dealer, who died in 2007. Curator Ann Temkin has now fulfilled that promise, …

Art’s Celebrity Obsession: How Many Movie Stars Does It Take to Make a Basquiat Record?

The art world has officially joined the rest of the world in a maniacal obsession with celebrity culture. Sure, Warhol did it long ago with his 1960s “screen tests” of Warren Beatty and Dylan, and by hosting the likes of Mick Jagger, Jackie O, her son John John and sister Lee Radziwill in Montauk in […]

Small Time: Revisiting Jeff Koons vs. Paul McCarthy

Is bigger art always better art? Certainly in the age of Instagram, anything monumental is hard to discredit; people are easily impressed and love to obsess over questions like “How did it get here, how was it made and how much does it cost?” Somehow they forget the basic questions: “What is it and why is it?”