According to the New York Times’ chief art critic Roberta Smith, she only gives one talk and she’s been giving it for the last 30 years. “I give it a new title every so often,” she quipped last week . Smith’s glibness may appear off-putting, but in person it was anything but. I interviewed her […]
‘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 […]
LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public […]
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 […]
The American Conceptualist Dan Graham has long worn many art world hats. He has produced films and videos, drawings and prints; chronicled rock culture; and collaborated with bands like Sonic Youth and Japanther. But Mr. Graham is perhaps best known for his architectural environments and glass pavilions, which he has been designing since the 1980s. […]
MEXICO CITY — Few devotees, domestic or foreign, seem to find their way to Mexico City’s museums of contemporary art, of which there are several. Nor are any of those museums firmly fixed on the route followed by the packs of art professionals — curators, collectors, dealers — who ritually travel the planet from one art […]
MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.
Those still mourning the loss of the Todd Williams Billie Tsien-designedAmerican Folk Art Museum at MoMA’s hands may find some (small) consolation in a new revelation: Although the building will still be demolished as planned, “We will take the façade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry told the New York Times. Taking down the façade […]
‘A World of Its Own,’ Examining Photography, at MoMA. Something old, something new, nothing borrowed and not enough color. A variation on the venerable bridal dress code pretty much sums up the Museum of Modern Art’s latest foray into its photography collection, “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio.” In turn, the title of […]
Peace and quiet can be hard to come by in the middle of Manhattan. Maybe, if the ice ever melts, you might balance a lunch burrito on your lap in the sunken plaza outside the McGraw-Hill Building. Or park yourself in a hotel lobby and pretend to be a guest. But for many people the […]
With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography At first glance, viewers of “What Is a Photograph?” opening on Jan. 31 at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form. “The show does not answer the question,” said […]
Two celebrated architect couples, whose careers took off almost simultaneously in the hothouse of New York City design and who supported each other’s successes, are barely on speaking terms. One pair, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, designed the former home of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street; the other, Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, just […]
Back in 2012, I wrote a post with the headline “How Larry Gagosian is like Goldman Sachs”. The general idea was that both of them use their relationships and their balance sheet to make money off and/or with their clients. Since then, as Christian Viveros-Fauné says, the art world has become even more coterminous with the art market: “Business […]
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 […]
Robert Duncan and Jess, and Their Wonderland of Art If you were young, gifted and odd, San Francisco was a good place to be in the years after World War II, when big changes were brewing in American art and culture. And that city is the setting for “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert […]
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 […]
Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery. Heavy metal. At the end of December, the PBS host Charlie Rose conducted a curious interview with Richard Serra about his new show in two locations of the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and it quickly became popular on the Internet. The conversation was notable mostly because it reached […]
At 76, David Hockney is in one of his primes, and apparently he knows it. Not for nothing is his exuberant, immersive survey at the de Young Museum here cheekily titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition.” By then [early 1980’s] Mr. Hockney was one of the most popular of all living artists. Thousands of people […]
Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart. Roberta Smith reviews Martin Creed
MIAMI BEACH — Eleven minutes into the 11 a.m. preview of Art Basel Miami Beach on Wednesday, Steve Wilson, a Kentucky collector, made his first purchase: an installation made from dozens of bricks by the Italian artist Elisabetta Benassi.