To have “taste” in art and know a bit about it is part of the battery of glib accomplishments that mark out the elite from ordinary folk. This hateful art snobbery has nothing to do with a true love of art – it is just about being able to talk the talk. The French sociologist Pierre […]
In 2007, Peter Doig went from being a painter quietly admired by collectors and curators to an art-world colossus when his work White Canoe—created 16 years earlier—was auctioned for a record-breaking $11.3 million. Soon after, both Scots and Canadians claimed the Edinburgh-born, Toronto- and Montreal-raised artist as their own—an impetus for the remarkable show No Foreign Lands, […]
Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin’s views on life boiled down to bullet points: • She is oppressed as a woman artist. […]
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and a mere five years later the first of what has been a new global wave of art fairs opened in New York City at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Think there’s a correlation between the collapse of Communism and art-market expansion? … Strolling down the aisles, looking at artworks, […]