Holland Cotter Looks at Money in Art A new year. A new New York mayor. Old problems with art in New York. I have a collection of complaints and a few (very few) ideas for change. Money — the grotesque amounts spent, the inequitable distribution — has dominated talk about art in the 21st century […]
They love, love, love Isa Genzken over at the Museum of Modern Art, where the artist’s first major American museum survey remains on view through March 10, before traveling to museums in Chicago and Dallas. The 65-year-old Berlin-based German sculptor, whose 150 works fill 10 open-plan galleries on the museum’s sixth floor, is “one of the most important artists […]
Christie’s and Sotheby’s Woo Big Sellers With a Cut When Christie’s sold Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Orange)”for $58.4 million in November, it seemed as if the auction house had just earned a pretty penny. After all, Christie’s, like other auction houses, typically charge commissions to buyers and sellers, which for high-priced works might be an […]
When the Museum of Modern Art wrapped up six months of foregone agonizing and decided to raze the American Folk Art Museum, it claimed to be sacrificing a small work of architecture for the sake of Big Art. MoMA’s prescription for the ideal viewing experience is more galleries, more wall space, more hallways, and bigger lobbies. […]
MoMA’s many expansions and redesigns have destroyed one of the most unique and precious public experiences of modern art. Who is Glenn D Lowry? A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.
The Museum of Modern Art is on the march again, advancing westward down 53rd Street, sweeping away the old American Folk Art Museum and planting its flag in the base of a future skyscraper. Only the American Folk Art Museum building, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s twelve-year-old gem, has to go, because, like a cobbler’s […]
We begin 2014 with a resolution, and that is to leave all the unfinished business of 2013 behind—to be done with it, to turn our back on it and give it not another thought. After all, we don’t want to start the new year by getting distracted by all the unexplored themes and missed opportunities […]
They may look like plain old photographs of road sides and supermarkets, but these meticulous images take hours to construct. It is the latest series of camouflage trickery unveiled by artist Liu Bolin, or ‘the invisible man’, who made his name blending into the background of everyday scenes.
Jacob Kassay turns 30 next year, which means he has time to develop some originality to match his surfeit of intelligence and attitude.
Art is Hard to See Through the Clutter of the Dollar$. Roberta Smith for the New York Times
Instead of catering to carefully selected museums and collectors, auction houses sell to the highest bidder. They find two people who want the same work and get them to bid as high as possible; often those who buy work will only sell it again in two years.
The influential but oft-maligned project of pop urbanist Richard Florida first took off in 2002 with the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he defined a new economic sector composed of creative laborers: a group extending beyond artists to include designers, journalists, and tech people, a “highly educated and well-paid segment of the […]
Christopher Wool is one of many painters who have experimented with bringing their medium to extinction. They strip it of familiar attributes like imagery, brushwork or flatness, often ending up with some kind of monochrome that suggests the last painting that could possibly be made. Again and again, these works make viewers ask, in effect: […]
‘Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,’ at the New Museum. “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum is a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration. It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history, expanding and rebalancing our understanding of his art.
When loving art becomes an obsession: at a gallery in New York City, a gallerina mischievously walks off with a painting she fell in love with. This gallery girl needs more than chocolate to calm down.
New York’s annual Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art may serve to celebrate the Costume Institute’s newest exhibitions but, from experience, it is also an event of debauchery! I feel like the Met Gala’s punk theme was dreamed up by a drunk intern who knew she was getting fired anyway so why not?
Jerry Saltz often offers and interesting take.
This was certainly a “performance”, but we are not sure if it was an “art performance”. Perhaps after viewing the Jay-Z video (or as much of the 10+ minutes you can get through), you might want to check out the BAC Link to the Vulture review by respected critic, Jerry Saltz, who often offers a thoughtful […]
Lately the ever-versatile artist Ugo Rondinone has focused with a certain steadiness on figurative sculpture — without, as usual, repeating himself.
I Found the Sublime in Jeff Koons (and No One Agreed With Me) Walter Robinson reviews three New York exhibitions by Jeff Koons at Gagosian, Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth and James Turrell at