What Was Fluxus? A Brief Guide to the Irreverent, Groundbreaking Art Movement

Fluxus was a loose confederation of international artists in the 1960s working in performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and even correspondence art (art sent through the postal service). It was often, though not exclusively, political in tone. Fluxus works shared similarities with the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow, particularly in the way they blurred distinctions […]

Wonders and blunders: what makes a great museum?

Artists, architects and curators tell us about the spaces they love—and hate. What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque […]

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye. Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead […]

The Art Market: now what?

This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision. To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with […]

The Politics of Seeing, Being, and Visibility in Photography

Aperture Magazine‘s first issue dedicated to African American lives as represented by the medium of photography, “Vision & Justice,” was published last month. It doesn’t seem right to call this issue a magazine. It is a powerhouse book; it does so much heavy lifting. The artists involved include Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, […]

In Tate Modern’s New Wing, a Broader, More Global View of Art

LONDON — The day began in the Turbine Hall, the 85-foot-tall atrium at the heart of Tate Modern, the most visited museum of modern and contemporary art in the world. If the museum functions like a medieval cathedral — as the Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of Tate’s Board of Trustees, suggested in a packet […]

Exploring Switch House, Tate Modern’s Ambitious Addition

Not much happens on time in London, let alone early. Switch House, the bold new Tate Modern extension opening on June 17, was originally planned for the end of next decade… ish. But five years after Herzog & de Meuron converted the Bankside Power Station, in 2000, visitor numbers had outpaced predictions by millions. According […]

To Martin Creed, Even a Shit Is Art

Everything is fair game for the Turner Prize-winning artist in a new show at the Park Avenue Armory. The Turner Prize-winning British artist is known for his singular (sometimes gross) sense of humor, sparking debate with seemingly mundane, Duchampian conceptual actions and for nabbing Britain’s coveted Turner Prize by rigging a light switch with a timer. […]

Martin Creed Sneaks Brilliance in Through “The Back Door”

Although he can come across as almost pathologically ill at ease and underprepared, the artist is clearly not lacking in confidence. The Armory’s largest space is its drill hall, which actually earns the overused adjective cavernous. Instead of cluttering it with whimsies, Creed has installed a single huge projection of a new work: a music-video-slick […]

Martin Creed Unleashes His Demons in ‘Back Door’ at the Park Avenue Armory

“It’s pretty remarkable the armory is letting us do this,” observed Mr. Eccles, who assembled the exhibition in partnership with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Actually, the exhibition is in the spirit of earlier armory shows spotlighting off-center artists like Paul McCarthy and Christian Boltanski — both of which Mr. […]

A More International Tate Modern

When the new 10-story museum opens June 17, it will boast a huge performance space, rooftop terrace and more geographically diverse collection. In a year of glitzy museum openings, from New York’s Met Breuer to San Francisco’s sleek SF MoMA, London’s Tate Modern is upping the ante. On June 17, the museum will open the […]

A Movement in a Moment: Land Art

Discover how a generation of artists swapped pencils for dumper trucks as they made the world their canvas. In the summer of 1967, while hitchhiking his way from St Martin’s School of Art to his home city of Bristol, the British art student Richard Long stopped in a field in Wiltshire, and walked repeatedly in […]

Ai Weiwei and Warhol, Together Again

“I remember going to a gallery opening and hearing people say ‘Andy is here, Andy is here,’ and suddenly I saw him through the crowd,” Mr. Ai recalled this week, walking through “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” at the Warhol Museum here. “It was incredible to be in the same room, but I was a nobody.” In […]

Installation of Richard Serra’s Sculpture “Sequence” @ SFMoMA

Follow Richard Serra’s to it recent installation at SF MoMA. Watch the video – make it BIG and turn on the volume.

Martin Creed interview: ‘Art is anything used as art by people’

I meet Martin Creed more than a week before his retrospective What’s the point of it? opens at the Hayward. The gallery is full of 25 years’ worth of improbable, witty, uplifting art; I am especially gladdened by a wall covered in 1,000 prints of broccoli. But the show is not ready yet: the atmosphere […]

Architect Annabelle Selldorf on Why Mega-Galleries Are Transforming Into Mini-Museums

If you are even a casual appreciator of art in New York, the chances are that you have stepped into one of Annabelle Selldorf’s spaces, and been entranced. Perhaps the most coveted architect among the minimalistically inclined art elite, Selldorf has designed a broad spectrum of the city’s art sites, from theNeue Galerie uptown, steeped […]

Why Museums Are Granting Google Free Access to Their Collections

Google Cultural Institute recently revealed that it has engineered the creatively named Google Art Camera: a custom-built camera intended to capture “ultra-high resolution ‘gigapixel’ images” of artworks in museums around the world. It also sharedabout 1,000 of these photographs online that allow anyone with internet access to zoom in closely to examine the originals — or rather, representations of the originals — […]

First look: inside the Switch House – Tate Modern’s power pyramid

Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others. It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension […]

Kienholz’s Five Car Stud goes back on view in Milan

For nearly 40 years, Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969-72), a dark installation depicting a brutal racist attack, lay hidden away in storage in Japan. It is now on public view in Milan at the Fondazione Prada, which acquired the work in 2012, soon after it was restored by the artist’s widow and collaborator Nancy […]