Police Shut Down Mosque Installation at Venice Biennale

The police in Venice closed an art installation in the form of a functioning mosque on Friday morning, after city officials declared the art project a security hazard and said that the artist who created it, Christoph Büchel, had not obtained proper permits and had violated laws by allowing too many people inside the mosque […]

The Danger Artist

Our final (so far) column on Chris Burden, by Peter Schjeldahl – you should read it. Burden adventured alone in wilds that aren’t outside civilized life but that seethe within it. He coolly structured convulsive experience.  His mastery of form made him a poet, as in a piece that I knew from hearsay and wrote […]

Christoph Büchel: The Mosque. Icelandic Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2015

Swiss artist Christoph Büchel was selected to represent Iceland at the 56th Art Biennale in Venice, Italy. His idea was to transform a church, Santa Maria della Misericordia at Campo de L’Abazia, into a mosque. Accordingly, the show is called The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice and has been realized […]

Artist draws controversy turning church into Venice’s first mosque

In a tranquil corner of Venice’s Cannaregio district stands a handsome church with an icing sugar white baroque facade. Its origins stretch back to the 10thcentury, but the last mass was celebrated here in 1967, since when, deconsecrated and in private hands, it has stood silent and unused. On 9 May, however, as the 56th […]

10 Tips To Make Art Fairs More Fun

As any seasoned art lover knows, art fairs are a double-edged sword: while attending them is an easy way to see and sell art, they aren’t always the most enjoyable experience (see 11 Art World Rules Decoded for 20-Something Newbies) thanks to myriad factors like inconvenient locations, overcrowded aisles, and the sheer amount of ground […]

11 Art World Rules Decoded for 20-Something Newbies

For a newcomer, the art world can often feel like a social minefield, booby-trapped so that as soon as you start to make progress in establishing a name for yourself, you screw it up with a big-time blunder. Luckily, we’ve got you covered on how to navigate everything from an open bar to a Twitter […]

When Is Artist-on-Artist Theft Okay?

New York artist Jamian Juliano-Villani is being accused by another artist of having sticky fingers. Brooklyn’s Scott Teplin sees too much similarity between a small painting by Juliano-Villani, now on view at West Village gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and a painting of his own. Juliano-Villani explained her thinking in a Facebook comment: It’s important to […]

Patrick Painter – The Genuine Article

JOHN NEWSOM: So, how did you discover art? What was your ‘eureka’ moment? PATRICK PAINTER: Well, when I was 28, I was living in Paris, and I was working for an insurance company, Metropolitan Life. One day I said to myself, “I don’t know anything about art, so I’m gonna start looking at art.” It’s […]

Take Your Time – New painting at the Museum of Modern Art.

Don’t attend the show seeking easy joys. Few are on offer in the work of the thirteen Americans, three Germans, and one Colombian—nine women and eight men—and those to be found come freighted with rankling self-consciousness or, here and there, a nonchalance that verges on contempt. The ruling insight that Hoptman proposes and the artists […]

Abusing the Marquis de Sade

PARIS — Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share, said that if the Marquis de Sade had not existed, he would have had to been invented. But probably one of the biggest badasses of all time did exist. And, as if to prove it, on the bicentenary of the death of the “divine marquis” (Donatien Alphonse de […]

The Worst: 10 Terrible Art World Moments of 2014

Putting aside any petty concerns for bridges burned, here’s an incomplete list of the most despicable moments in 2014’s art world, as viewed by Scott Indrisek of Blouin Artinfo.com.  From from candy factories to soggy concerts, there are two sides to every story, right?

Year of record sales, but at what cost to the art?

Unease grows as it gets harder for artists to resist servicing a booming market The art market appeared to be in rude health as 2014 drew to a close. More money was spent on blue-chip and emerging art last year than at any other point in history, and the trade has been in rapid expansion […]

Year in review: six things you need to know about the art market

2014 has been a year of increasing disruption in the art market. While its vastly increased value over the past ten years (€47.4bn in 2013 compared to €18.6bn in 2003, according to the latest Tefaf report by Clare McAndrew) has inevitably brought change, 2014 has seen those changes magnified and evolving in directions that were not […]

Europe’s 10 Best Art Fairs in 2014

This year hasn’t even come to an end. Yet, intrepid gallerists and collectors are no doubt already pulling out their calendars to mark out the fair circuit for the year 2015. To help weed out the best from the rest, artnet News’ European editors sorted through the stacks of notes and reports from the year’s fairs […]

The Most-Read Articles of 2014 – Artnews

To meet the needs of the season, a list follows below of some of the most popular stories that ran on the ARTnews website in 2014, ranging from artist profiles and investigative stories to on-the-ground art-fair coverage and breaking news. They are divided by month, and presented in no particular order.  Lots here to read, to get ready for 2015.

The 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2014 Edition

While other art publications sing the praises of the rich and powerful, we like to look at those who are largely overlooked (or worse, exploited) in order to understand the real state of the art world and its discontents. So, here you have our annual assessment of those below the most powerful. And yes, we’ve finally unhitched […]

Best of 2014: Art

The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]

Poverty lines: where are the poor in art today?

Caravaggio, Bruegel and Van Gogh all made studies of the poor in spite of rich patronage. Why aren’t more artists doing that now? Art has a long history of entertaining the rich. From ancient artisans who made gold drinking cups for kings, to the artists of today who sell installations to plutocrats, art has been a […]

2014 in Review: Top 10 Big (Architecture) Projects

Best art gallery: Museo Jumex by David Chipperfield Architects Built to house the private contemporary art collection of Colección Jumex, owner of Mexico’s leading juice company, David Chipperfield’s three-storey-tall gem of a building is a paragon of travertine-clad understatement. The most distinguishing feature of the relatively small, 2,500-square-metre building is a row of sawtooth peaks that give it the look […]