A View Inside the Art World: Author Henry Alford attended the record-breaking auctions of modern art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but to watch, not buy. Henry’s hilarious commentary in the NYT on his experiences at the Christie’s including at the preview auction brunch: “Are you having fun?” he asked me. “I am,” I said. “But […]
Art is Hard to See Through the Clutter of the Dollar$. Roberta Smith for the New York Times
Our first instinct is to marvel at the forgers’ skill and lament their misdeeds. But while forgery is very clearly an economic crime, it may not always be an artistic or aesthetic one. Forgers can even be an art lover’s friend. Blake Gopnik in New York Times
Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s main challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow” — in other words, an artistic preoccupation that will sustain a lifetime of development, not peter out by the third or even second show.
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.
“I bought it through Amazon because it was quick and easy,” she said. Amazon is betting that millions of buyers like Ms. DeFord will happily buy paintings and prints in the same way that they now buy shoes or books or kitchen appliances online. We shall see …
The protean Carol Bove continues to cultivate her extraordinary garden, operating in the gaps between art and design, modernism (especially Minimalism) and nature, language and structure, found and made, order and chaos, her work/art and other people’s work/art. One of the best artists of our peculiar moment, …
For Art Dealers, a New Life on the Art Fair Circuit In just the past few months a New York art dealer flew to Hong Kong for that city’s first global art fair; gave a party for 50 at Harry’s Bar in Venice; installed an exhibition at his gallery in London; spent three days schmoozing […]
Walter De Maria, a reclusive American sculptor whose multifaceted achievement and sly Dadaist humor helped give rise to earthworks, Conceptual Art and Minimal art, on an often monumental scale, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo […]
Lately the ever-versatile artist Ugo Rondinone has focused with a certain steadiness on figurative sculpture — without, as usual, repeating himself.
Thanks to the Gagosian art empire, a ludicrous number of paintings by Damien Hirst are on display right now: 331 of Mr. Hirst’s implacably cheerful “spot” abstractions spread among Gagosian’s 11 galleries in 8 cities on 3 continents. The good news, of course, is that they’re not all in one place. And none involve dead animals, maggots, encrusted diamonds […]
In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the […]