One evening in 1968, Mark Rothko regaled the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who had dropped by his studio on his way home from Pace Gallery in New York, with the story of a visit from a collector that day. Pointing to an enormous painting of dark blue and black rectangles floating on a deep burgundy […]
People say we’re in the middle of a second civil rights movement, and we are. The only surprise is that the first one ever ended. The artistKerry James Marshall was there for it. He was just a kid then, born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955. But kids take in a lot. He was in Birmingham […]
These are early days, but the Hieronymus Bosch vision of a socioeconomic apocalypse that many feared would follow Britain’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union has yet to materialize. True, the pound has lost about 10 percent of its value against other major currencies, and a huge amount of political uncertainty still remains, […]
This fall, “Icons of Modern Art” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation may be the show that takes Paris by storm. No fewer than 130 paintings by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and Derain, among many others, from the collection of the renowned Russian cultural figure Sergei Shchukin will hang on the walls of this museum by […]
The Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospectivewith an image of Bombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at […]
The Seattle Art Fair, started last year by Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has a proud inner geek. But like Mr. Allen himself, who has fingerprints on much of the city’s explosion of growth, geekiness only touches the surface. Through a real estate development arm of his company, Vulcan Inc., he is building […]
THE sculptor Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” For most of the last century, residential and commercial developments in New York City tended to marry architecture and art with that […]
Over the last eight years, as cameras have become smaller and smaller — tiny enough to fit on a pair of glasses or inside a swallowable pill —John Reuter has been working to stave off extinction of one of the largest cameras ever made, so big and irredeemably analog that it feels, he says, “as […]
A kind of extended happening, or maybe a series of short ones, has gently taken over the Park Avenue Armory, one of the architectural gems of New York. Numerous moving parts, animate and inanimate, are involved, and they are all the doing of the British maverick Martin Creed, the first artist to be given the […]
“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. […]
“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 […]
The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than […]
Richard Serra may have his ideological detractors, but he is certainly today’s greatest living sculptor of Minimalist abstraction. Exhibitions of new works occupying Gagosian Gallery’s two Chelsea display spaces find Mr. Serra at 76 still wrangling fundamentals of shape, space, gravity and time into objects and installations of thrilling severity. The most arresting piece at […]
Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work. Now they’re expected to provide money, too. In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time […]
Political art has changed over the past 50 years. Unlike the protest art of an earlier era, much of the most interesting new work feels slippery and evasive, as if reluctant to speak its mind. In part, this is a reflection of different, though not necessarily evolved, thinking. We’ve abandoned old beliefs in utopias, in […]
On the title track of “Blackstar,” the David Bowie record released just a couple of days before his death on January 10th, Bowie sings, “I’m not a pop star.” True, he was an attractive celebrity with hit records, great hair and a vaguely gender-bending past. But for me, and for his millions of fans, he […]
In the video for David Bowie’s “Lazarus,” released last week, the mythic singer and rock ’n’ roll shape-shifter, ever thin but bordering on gaunt, is blindfolded and writhing in a hospital bed. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he sings. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.” In the end, a shaking Mr. Bowie retreats […]
Any exhibition of older art drawn from a museum’s permanent collection is a palm held out for us to read, a snapshot of the museum’s sense of its role over time, its present ambitions and its view of art history. Place two such exhibitions side by side and an especially intense and revealing frisson can […]
Ellsworth Kelly, one of America’s great 20th-century abstract artists, who in the years after World War II shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms distilled from everyday life, died on Sunday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y. He was 92. Although he […]
“Buy the best, forget the rest” has become the conventional wisdom for collectors in today’s investment-minded art market. But what does “the best” mean? Clearly it meant different things to the 77,000 people who flocked to Art Basel Miami Beach this month. The fair, the last major event of 2015 for the hectic contemporary art […]