Laing Brown on Collecting Contemporary Art

Sunday  May 28  2:00 – 3:30 – New Media Gallery Talk Laing Brown Talk: Collecting Contemporary Art New Media Gallery is delighted to welcome Laing Brown who will share his extensive experience, personal insights and passion for art in an enjoyable and accessible talk: Collecting Contemporary Art.  Laing lays out the 10 RULES for collecting  contemporary art, and will speak to […]

Talk – Collecting Contemporary Art, Audain Art Museum, Whistler, Canada

Laing Brown is an art collector who is interested in ideas. Brown, chair of the Audain Art Museum acquisitions committee and an external advisor to the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Canada, has just returned from Britain, where he went to check out Frieze London, where 160 of the world’s top commercial galleries […]

Public Talk: Collecting Contemporary Art

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – Sir Winston Churchill Join Laing Brown, a noted art collector, Board Member and Chair of the Audain Art Museum Acquisitions Committee, for a public multi-media presentation where he will discuss his Top 10 Collecting Rules for contemporary […]

Ai Weiwei’s Tree – NGC Collection

Ai Weiwei’s Tree (2009–10) stands a towering five metres in height, and spans the same distance at its upper reaches. A commanding yet enchanting presence in Gallery B105, Tree is flanked to the west by the late Sol LeWitt’s experiment with colour and asymmetry, Wall Drawing No. 623 Double asymmetrical pyramids with colour ink washes […]

Audio-fail: why is so much sound art so bad?

Susan Philipsz and John Cage have shown that the genre has claims to greatness, but two works in Edinburgh betray the emptiness of much sound art. Let’s get this straight, sound art buffs: of course art can be made with sound. It can be made with anything. The first masterpiece of sound art is Marcel […]

Vancouver-born Geoffrey Farmer to represent Canada at La Biennale di Venezia in 2017

As the commissioner of the Canada Pavilion in Venice, the National Gallery of Canada announces that Geoffrey Farmer will represent Canada in 2017 at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, in Italy. Over his 20-year career, his installations have been acclaimed around the world and have been shown in numerous solo […]

Wael Shawky’s Epic Films Will Completely Change How You See the Crusades

Egypt-born and -based Wael Shawky inhabits the epic’s structure impeccably, and in the most unexpected way possible: with puppets. In a lush, labyrinthine trilogy of films being exhibited at MoMA PS1, he uses sublimely designed, marvelously costumed ensembles of marionettes and puppets — some made centuries ago, others fashioned by the artist of Murano glass. […]

Glorious 40-Part Motet returns to National Gallery for holidays – video

 The National Gallery has re-installed  Forty-Part Motet, the sound work by Janet Cardiff that is one of the very best things in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Forty-Part Motet consists of 40-plus voices, each singing its own part of the 16th-century choral piece Spem in Alium, by Thomas Tallis, and each heard through its own speaker. The 40 speakers are […]

Inside 20,000 balloons: Martin Creed’s fun, disorienting Work No. 202

No more envying the kids in the ball room at IKEA. The National Gallery has a new work of contemporary art that’s sort of an adult version of a ball-filled room, with a subtext of deep thinking. The installation is titled Work No. 202: Half the Air in a Given Space, and it’s byMartin Creed, who won Britain’s sometimes-controversial […]