“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” proclaimed Marcel Duchamp, Dada master and the man behind everyone’s favorite urinal. The phrase only begins to explain the versatile, zany and ever-evolving works of the French-American artist, famously known for “The Fountain,” his 1917 pièce de résistance that will go […]
Museum-goers were treated to a shocking display at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery on Saturday when a visitor stripped naked before Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” As the naked man faced the Botticelli painting, he struck the same pose as the goddess depicted in the 15th-century work. He then scattered rose petals around himand took a knee in front of the famous […]
I have been an invited interloper in the fiefdoms of the decimal-pointed rich long enough now to know that when rich men want to distinguish themselves from other rich men they buy art. Among practitioners of modern-day social one-upmanship this is hardly new. The nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age were the first Americans to […]
The man behind the World’s Most Expensive Painting
David Hockney recently touched off a controversywith a poster advertising his new exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts that read: “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.” When the BBC journalist Andrew Marr asked Hockney if the statement was a dig at Damien Hirst, who employs up to 100 craftsmen to […]