Phyllida Barlow: Dock, Tate Britain

A joyous celebration of ad hoc creativity fills the Duveen Galleries. The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the […]

Martin Creed: First Major Survey A Multi Sensory Fun Fair

Unknown, alien objects disorientate you from your very first steps: once you’ve navigated past the dog-eared sofa that curiously blocks the entrance, Work No.1092 (2011) hurtles worryingly close above your head (or for taller visitors, could well threaten decapitation). It’s exciting, but witty too – the 12-metre long neon sign , spelling ‘Mothers’, dwarfs you […]

Why Art Doesn’t Pay

Over Facebook, I asked an informal question about who pays artists. I wasn’t surprised by the results. Many artists, including those still in school, tend to pay other artists, actors, and writers who’ve assisted with the production of a work. Even those with limited means tend to exchange work, materials, or other barterable goods. Contrast […]

Howard Hodgkin: ‘Once I stop painting, they should start measuring my coffin’

He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]

“Peter and Jane” (not their real names) Go to the Gallery …

We Go to the Gallery, is a book which is a riff on what’s popularly known in the UK as the Peter and Jane series — early readers that have been published by the Penguin UK imprint Ladybird Books since the 1960s.  The Peter and Jane books show the siblings of the same names, plus their Mummy, […]

Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture will become Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

MOSCOW.- Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture today announced that beginning on 1 May, it will become Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The announcement was made following Garage’s 2nd International Conference—The Reflexive Museum: Responsive Spaces for Publics, Ideas, and Art—which brought together thought leaders from around the globe on 20-21 March for discussions about what […]

Double trouble: Art’s most controversial duos – video

One great rock duo – the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince – explore the greatest duos in art.  Featuring double-acts such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and Lucian Freud and Leigh Bowery, they examine this most intense bond as part of the Tate Unlock Art series. Watch […]

The Art of Curation – Hans Ulrich Obrist

Behind every great artist is a great curator. But what do they actually do? Serpentine superstar Hans Ulrich Obrist reveals the delights and dangers of his craft – while Yoko Ono, David Shrigley and more pick their all-time favourite show. Diaghilev and Cocteau tried to explain what they did with the words: “Etonnez moi!” Astonish […]

Mike Kelley’s riveting adolescent stage

By 1991, Mike Kelley had emerged as a crucial artist in Los Angeles, at the head of a pack that had pushed into prominence in the previous decade. His riveting sculptures reassembled from ratty stuffed animals, crocheted dolls and other tattered children’s playthings that he scavenged from thrift shops were also generating considerable critical attention […]

The 10 greatest works of art ever

From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?

Battle Lines for Change

‘Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,’ at the Brooklyn Museum. “A change is gonna come,” the soul singer Sam Cooke promised in his 1964 hit song. And so it did. Officially, it arrived fast, with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act that year. In reality, its progress was killingly slow, and […]

What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement

Could it be? Are we already post-Internet? It’s a bemusing term you may have heard floating around the art world recently, and now a new exhibition called “Art Post-Internet” at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—organized by critic/curator Karen Archey with writer/gallerist Robin Peckham—has set out to encapsulate the budding movement, which may be the most significant of its kind […]

Art World Places Its Bet

LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]

Daily Pic: Art’s Favorite Subject

In art schools, there is an ancient rule – maybe first promulgated by Her Worship Marina Abramovic – decreeing that it’s not performance art until a girl takes her clothes off. This is a still from a brand-new six-minute video by Jennifer Bornstein, on view in the Whitney Biennial, that feels as though it’s revisiting that […]

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens Yoko Ono restrospective

Yoko Ono (B. 1933, Tokyo) has been recognized as one of the most outstanding avant-garde artists for over sixty years. She is a pioneer in many of the artistic fields to which she has dedicated her life, and is considered to be one of the precursors to conceptual art, film and performance art. She is […]

Yoko Ono show at Guggenheim shines light on pioneering conceptual artist

Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste’s true talents, her reach and influence. ‘The ladder John had to climb up was very high,” recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that […]

Burritos in the Gallery? How Post-Everything Sculpture Works Today

2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Marcel Duchamp walked into the Society of Independent Artists lugging a porcelain urinal he had purchased at 5th Avenue’s J. L. Mott Iron Works and submitted it as a “readymade” sculpture. Duchamp’s radical and audacious gesture was met, at the time, with shock and indignation—it was literally hidden away behind a screen during the […]

The Case of the “Million-Dollar” Broken Vase

When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’sheadline was typical of the coverage: “MIAMI ARTIST DESTROYS $1 MILLION AI WEIWEI VASE IN PROTEST.” Variations […]